MODERN    INDUSTRY 

IN  RELATION  TO 
THE  FAMILY,  HEALTH 
EDUCATION,  MORALITY 


MODERN    INDUSTRY 

IN  RELATION  TO 
THE  FAMILY,  HEALTH 
EDUCATION,  MORALITY 


BY 
FLORENCE  KELLEY 

General  Secretary,  National  Consumers'  League 


LONGMANS,  GREEN,  AND    CO. 

FOURTH  AVENUE  AND  30TH  STREET,  NEW  YORK 
LONDON,  BOMBAY  AND  CALCUTTA 

1914 


COPYBIGHT,  1914,  BY 

LONGMANS,  GREEN,  AND  CO. 


NOTE 

This  volume  contains  the  substance — amplified  to 
accord  with  the  unprecedently  rapid  progress  of 
legislation  —  of  four  lectures  given  in  1913  at  Teach- 
ers' College,  Columbia  University.  They  formed  the 
opening  course  of  lectures  delivered  annually  under 
the  Isabel  Hampton  Robb  Foundation,  established 
by  the  National  League  of  Nursing  Education. 


336234 


MODERN  INDUSTRY  IN   RELATION   TO 
THE  FAMILY 


MODERN    INDUSTRY    AND    THE    FAMILY 

MODERN  industry  affords,  in  more  generous 
measure  than  the  human  race  has  before  known 
them,  all  those  goods  which  form  the  material 
basis  of  family  life — food,  clothing,  shelter,  and 
the  materials  and  opportunities  for  subsistence 
for  husband,  wife  and  children. 

But  modern  industry  tends  to  disintegrate  the 
family,  so  threatens  it  that  the  civilized  nations 
are,  and  for  at  least  one  generation  have  been,  ac- 
tively building  a  code  intended  to  save  the  family 
from  this  destructive  pressure. 

This  is  the  paradox  of  Modern  Industry. 

It  is  my  object  to  illustrate  this  paradox  by  in- 
dicating some  forms  of  the  pressure  of  industry 
upon  the  family,  and  upon  each  of  its  elements. 

The  American  ideal  of  the  home — inherited 
from  the  time  when  we  were  an  agricultural  coun- 
try— includes  father,  mother  and  children  living 
together  in  a  house;  the  father  the  breadwinner, 
the  mother  the  homemaker,  the  children  at  play 
and  at  school  until  they  reach  a  reasonable  age  for 

3 


4        Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

•Work— t&e*  boys  Jfrelping  their  fathers  with  the 
:  .oMores,;ab,d  tEe'girlg  learning  under  their  mothers' 
eyes  the  arts  of  the  housewife,  the  house  which 
shelters  this  group  being  the  property  of  the  fam- 
ily or  in  process  of  becoming  their  property. 
Originally,  the  typical  home  was  a  farm  which 
furnished  subsistence,  and  the  children  received 
within  the  family  group  industrial,  religious  and 
moral  training.  Our  departure  from  this  early 
ideal  under  the  pressure  of  modern  industry  is 
conspicuous. 

The  paradoxical  tendency  of  the  family  to  disin- 
tegrate under  pressure  of  the  same  industry  which 
affords  it  infinite  material  enrichment  offers  the 
key  to  a  complex,  varied  legislative  movement  go- 
ing forward  in  all  the  civilized  nations.  Seem- 
ingly incoherent,  this  movement  is  a  ramified  ef- 
fort to  safeguard  the  family.  The  mind  is  wear- 
ied even  by  a  partial  enumeration  of  the  elements 
of  the  industrial  and  political  code  upon  which  the 
modern  world  is  at  work  to  this  end.* 

*  Among  those  elements  the  following  are  important: 

a.  Compulsory  arbitration  of  labor  disputes; 

b.  Workmen's   compensation   and  social  insurance,  factory 
inspection  and  compulsory  provision  of  fire  precautions  and 
safety  devices; 

c.  Regulation  of  working  time,  including  one  day's  rest  in 
seven,  a  short  working  day,  prohibition  of  night  work  for 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family        5 

Such  effort  to  bulwark  the  family  by  compre- 
hensive legislation  arises  because,  all  over  the 
modern  world,  a  large  and  increasing  proportion 
of  husbands  and  fathers  are  by  the  nature  of  their 
work  taken  out  of  their  homes,  or  killed  outright, 
or  maimed,  or  they  are  disabled  by  industrial  dis- 
eases, and  thus  disqualified  for  their  normal  duty 
of  breadwinner. 

Or  throughout  long  periods  of  seasonal  unem- 
ployment they  are  recurrently  without  earnings. 
Even  when  in  health  and  at  work,  unskilled  labor- 
ers and  many  employees  of  higher  grade  are  so 
far  underpaid  that  they  cannot  maintain  their 
wives  and  children,  who  are,  therefore,  drawn  out 
of  the  home  into  industry  to  supplement  the  earn- 
ings of  the  father;  or  the  home  is  invaded  under 
the  sweating  system  by  the  materials  of  industry. 

women  and  children,  and  the  utmost  attainable  restriction  of 
night  work  for  men; 

d.  Prohibition  of  child  labor  and  of  homework  under  the 
sweating  system; 

e.  Minimum  wage  boards  and  widows'  pensions  with  gen- 
erous  provision   for   institutional   care   of   certain   classes   of 
diseased  and  defective  children; 

f.  Compulsory  education  prolonged  for  part  time  instruc- 
tion throughout  minority; 

g.  Housing  codes; 
h.  Pure  food  laws; 

i.  The  enfranchisement  of  women. 


6        Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

Tendency  to  Celibacy 

Vast  numbers  of  men  never  found  families  at 
all,  because  they  fear  to  marry  upon  insufficient 
wages  insecurely  held  by  reason  of  the  precarious 
nature  of  many  employments;  or  because  their 
health  is  destroyed  before  they  reach  an  economic 
position  which  seems  to  them  to  justify  mar- 
riage; or  because  the  girls  whom  they  would 
gladly  marry v&rejworn  out  and  broken_down\in  the 
service  of  industry. 

Abjuring  family  life  is  a  social  loss  from  every 
point  of  view,  most  of  all  when  the  men  who  thus 
deny  themselves  are  of  a  high  type  and  animated 
by  unselfishness.  Citizens  of  Cincinnati  are  erect- 
ing a  memorial  to  such  a  man,  Joe  Haeberle,  once 
head  of  the  truck  drivers'  union  of  that  city.  This 
self-taught  German  immigrant  worked  himself 
literally  to  death  in  the  service  of  the  children  of 
Ohio.  Having  obtained  some  drinking  fountains 
for  the  teamsters'  horses,  he  discovered  that  the 
children  made  them  centres  of  their  play  during 
school  hours.  Thus  he  learned  that  great  numbers 
of  children  were  out  of  school  because  Cincinnati 
had  not,  at  that  time,  free  school  books.  For 
many  years  he  carried  on  the  agitation  for  free 
books,  for  effective  compulsory  education  and,  at 
the  last,  for  workable  child  labor  laws.  Ham- 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family        7 

pered  by  his  foreign  accent,  his  uncouth,  ill-fitting 
clothes,  and  his  uncertain  teamster's  gait,  Joe 
Haeberle  spent  every  free  evening,  every  holiday, 
every  Sunday  struggling  against  indifference,  and 
prejudice,  and  active,  open  hostility,  to  get  for  the 
children  of  Ohio  the  best  that  any  state  gives  its 
children.  A  few  months  before  his  too  early  death, 
he  told  one  of  his  friends  that  he  had  never  been 
willing  to  ask  a  woman  to  share  with  him  the 
hardships  of  life  on  the  only  earnings  he  could 
hope  for,  ten  dollars  a  week.  Faithful  to  his  ideal 
of  the  society  of  the  future  in  which  all  children 
should  have  the  opportunity  of  education,  un- 
selfish in  his  life  and  his  death,  this  tender,  de- 
voted servant  of  the  children  lived  and  died  wife- 
less and  childless. 

Compulsory  celibacy  is  the  lot  of  vast  numbers 
of  men  employed  upon  reclamation,  schemes, 
building  railways,  tunnels  and  water  power  con- 
structions. Soinetmies_the  work  lies  far  from 
civilization^  but  oftener — as  in  Massachusetts, 
Connecticut  and  New  York — the  inhumane  ar- 
rangements of  the  construction  companies  and 
contractors  make  family  life  impossible  for  men 
who  do  this  work.  Worn-out  freight  cars  and 
vermin-ridden  bunk  houses  are  not  fit  homes  for 
wives  and  children.  But  these  are  the  dwellings 
afforded  for  rapidly  increasing  thousands  of  work- 


8        Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

ing  men,  for  years  at  a  time,  a  group  being  moved 
from  one  section  to  another  of  some  great  under- 
taking, the  quality  of  their  quarters  varying  little. 

Of  all  the  occupations  which  detach  men  from 
home  life  the  oldest  is  that  of  the  sailors.  In 
Phoenicia,  in  the  Greece  of  Homer,  their  craft 
was  already  an  ancient  one.  In  our  ports  as  then 
the  sailors  are  proverbially  homeless,  and  their 
numbers  grow  as  the  industry  of  Europe,  particu- 
larly that  of  Germany  and  England,  lives  increas- 
ingly by  manufacturing  and  distributing  through- 
out the  world  raw  materials  from  the  Tropics, 
these  nations  importing  meanwhile  in  ever  larger 
proportion  their  own  food  supplies.* 

New  and  characteristic  of  modern  industry  is 
the  myriad  of  men  who  float  about  on  land,  their 
family  life  reduced  to  a  minimum  by  the  nature 
of  their  occupations,  among  whom  are  commer- 
cial travellers,  kept  perforce  away  from  their  fam- 
ilies a  large  part  of  every  year.  Sleeping  car  con- 
ductors and  porters,  and  dining  car  waiters,  leav- 
ing New  York  to  go  to  Chicago,  may  there  find  or- 
ders to  go  on  to  Seattle  or  San  Diego,  and  do  not 
know  when  they  will  again  reach  home.  In  gen- 
eral, family  life  in  the  home  is  obviously  mini- 
mized for  all  those  husbands  and  fathers  whose 

*The  phenomenal  development  of  the  cocoa  and  chocolate 
industry  and  of  rubber  production  are  cases  in  point. 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family        9 

work  keeps  them  travelling,  e.  g.,  railway  engi- 
neers, firemen  and  brakemen,  conductors,  porters 
and  waiters. 

Hotel  employes,  cooks  and  waiters,  and  domes- 
tic servants  are  virtually  condemned  by  the  pres- 
ent organization  of  their  occupations  to  separation 
from  their  wives  and  children.  And  the  demand 
of  the  last  named  employment  for  surrender  of 
the  family  tie  is  obviously  an  element  in  the  per- 
manent, universal,  unorganized  boycott  of  domes- 
tic service  by  American  men.  Native  white  Amer- 
ican valets,  footmen  and  butlers  virtually  do  not 
exist. 

When  the  farm  gave  us  our  ideal  of  family  life, 
many  varieties  of  industrial  activity  were  carried 
on  upon  farms  and  in  rural  villages.  The  village 
blacksmith  once  made  the  plough  which  the 
farmer  owned.  Now  the  city  of  Moline  has  grown 
up  around  the  plough-making  industry,  producing 
millions  of  ploughs.  South  Bend  makes  agricul- 
tural wagons,  and  Auburn  manufactures  the  far- 
mers7 binding  twine.  Many  cities  thus  specialize, 
each  in  one  industry  formerly  conducted  on  the 
farms. 

While  those  industries  have  gone  from  rural 
life,  a  new  disintegrating  element  has  arisen  in  the 
floating  agricultural  workers,  a  new  apparition 
from  the  city  invading  the  country  for  a  part  of 


10      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

the  year.  When  a  Settlement  recently  wished  to 
send  a  young  man  to  work  on  a  Connecticut  farm, 
some  forty  farmers  replied  that  there  would  be 
work  not  for  the  whole  year,  but  for  a  few  months 
only.  For  the  prospective  farm  laborer  in  a  New 
England  state  these  offers  meant  the  choice  over 
the  winter  between  tramping  and  the  city  lodging 
house. 

In  the  West  thousands  of  men  now  go  annually 
from  the  cities  to  work  in  the  grain  harvest  for  a 
period  varying  from  five  to  nine  months.  At  Hull 
House,  years  ago,  it  was  horrifying  to  discover, 
in  the  neighboring  frame  cottages,  Italian  women 
with  children  living  four  families  in  four  rooms 
of  a  flat,  one  wife  and  her  children  in  one  room, 
because  the  four  men  breadwinners  of  the  fam- 
ilies had  gone,  early  in  the  spring,  to  work  on  the 
railroads.  Later  the  men  would  leave  the  rail- 
roads for  the  harvesting,  beginning  in  Texas  or 
Arkansas,  working  northward  into  Western  Can- 
ada, and  returning  home  to  Chicago  toward 
Thanksgiving.  Sometimes  they  did  not  come  back 
at  all.  After  the  harvest  every  year,  families 
were  left  fatherless  by  this  new  American  agri- 
culture. We  thought  of  this  development  of 
pressure  of  industry  upon  family  life  as  an  epi- 
sode. 

After  twenty  years  we  know,  however,  that  it 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      11 

is  a  regular  part  of  Western  American  agriculture, 
which  affords  no  foundation  for  normal  home  life 
for  these  thousands  of  migratory  employes.  In 
the  canning  industry  there  are,  besides  floating 
families  of  workers  in  buildings  and  sheds,  vegeta- 
ble and  berry  pickers  by  thousands  of  families  in 
fields.  That  is  one  most  striking  change  that 
modern  industry  has  wrought  in  agriculture  and 
its  immediate  derivative  industries,  canning  and 
fruit  preserving.  In  the  West  it  is  men  who  mi- 
grate in  the  service  of  agriculture.  In  the  East  it 
is  largely  women  with  numerous  young  children. 

In  the  case  of  sailors,  the  nature  of  the  work 
itself  involves  the  sacrifice  of  family  life  in  the 
home.  In  many  other  industries,  however,  the  sac- 
rifice is  wantonly  exacted,  as  when  city  railway 
companies  require  the  twelve  hours  day,  and  the 
seven  days  week,  and  their  men  are  never  at  home 
to  see  the  children  awake.  The  federal  statute  in- 
tended to  preserve  the  health  of  railway  em- 
ployes in  interstate  commerce  permits  them  to 
work  sixteen  hours  in  twenty-four ! 

Night  work  done  in  paper  mills,  glassworks,  and 
steel  manufacture,  and  a  growing  number  of  con- 
tinuous industries  keeps  fathers  away  from  home 
and  makes  impossible  any  wholesome  domestic 
companionship.  A  father  at  home  by  day,  who  is 
trying  to  make  up  sleep  lost  the  night  before 


12      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

while  at  work,  is  not  a  helpful  element  of  the  fam- 
ily life. 

Night  work  of  many  kinds  is  obviously  un- 
avoidable. Its  present  rapidly  increasing  dislo- 
cation of  family  life  is,  however,  doubtless  des- 
tined to  be  checked  in  proportion  as  the  workers 
attain  a  deciding  voice  by  strengthening  their  la- 
bor organizations,  or  by  using  their  votes  more 
wisely,  or  even  by  convincing  the  courts  that  the 
present  distribution  of  working  hours  is  contrary 
to  sound  public  policy. 

In  the  interest  of  the  family  life  of  wage  earn- 
ers, to  assure  to  fathers  opportunity  of  compan- 
ionship with  their  wives  and  children,  we  Amer- 
icans, in  the  Twentieth  Century,  have  to  strive 
to  get  by  statute  that  which  was  laid  upon  the 
race  by  the  Commandments,  namely,  one  day's 
rest  in  seven.  This  was  commanded  as  of  equal 
importance  with  the  injunction,  Thou  Shalt  Not 
Kill.  The  Book  of  Genesis  records  that  the  Lord 
rested  upon  the  seventh  day. 

Destruction  of  Fathers  and  Injury  of  Mothers 

When  families  are  founded  they  are,  with  ap- 
palling frequency,  disrupted  by  the  destruction 
that  industry  entails  upon  breadwinners.  In 
New  York,  this  greatest  of  all  the  industrial  states, 
our  highest  court  has  held  within  three  years  that, 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      13 

to  compel  employers  to  pay  a  fixed  compensation 
to  injured  employes  or  surviving  widows  and 
children,  would  be  taking  property  from  the  em- 
ployers without  due  process  of  law.  Yet  the 
process  provided  by  the  statute  embodied  the 
principles  common  to  the  compensation  laws  of 
modern  industrial  nations.*  Workmen's  com- 
pensation was  thus  held  contrary  to  our  consti- 
tution. Until  this  decision  can  be  reversed,  work- 
ing people  will  have,  in  this  state,  only  the  barest 
gambling  chance  to  receive,  under  the  common 
law,  some  quite  incalculable  sum  awarded  by  a 
jury,  after  years  of  delay  in  the  courts.  And  the 
most  dynamic  of  all  stimuli — the  financial  in- 
centive for  making  industry  safe — is  withdrawn 
from  employers. 

Under  this  decision  industry  does  not  pay  its 
bills  in  the  greatest  industrial  state  in  the  Repub- 
lic. If  a  railroad  has  killed  the  breadwinner  of  a 

*Ives  case,  Court  of  Appeals  of  New  York,  March  24, 
1911.  Judge  Werner,  the  presiding  judge  of  the  New  York 
Court  of  Appeals,  who  wrote  the  decision  in  the  Ives  case, 
was  not  re-elected  to  succeed  himself  at  the  election  in  No- 
vember, 1913.  At  the  same  election  the  New  York  State 
Constitution  was  amended  by  a  popular  vote  for  the  purpose 
of  facilitating  legislation  creating  workmen's  compensation. 
In  December,  1913,  a  statute  was  enacted  in  accordance  with 
the  powers  conferred  by  the  amended  Constitution.  This 
new  statute  also  will,  however,  be  tested  as  to  its  constitu- 
tionality in  due  time  by  the  New  York  Court  of  Appeals. 


14      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

family,  the  railroad  industry  is  not  now  legally 
the  debtor  of  his  widow  during  widowhood,  and 
of  the  fatherless  children  even  until  the  16th 
birthday.  If  the  breadwinner  is  not  killed  but 
disabled  by  an  injury  incident  to  his  work,  or  by 
an  industrial  disease,  transforming  him  from  the 
breadwinner  to  a  dragging  burden  upon  his  wife 
and  children,  they  need  not  less  but  greater  in- 
demnification for  their  loss,  not  from  taxes,  or 
charity,  but  from  the  industry  which  deprives 
them  of  their  breadwinner.  We  are,  as  a  nation, 
far  slower  than  the  nations  of  Europe  to  enforce 
the  payment  of  this  debt  to  families  bereft  by  in- 
dustry of  their  breadwinners.* 

As i  marriages_fail  to  occur,  and  families  fail  to 
be  founded,  because  of  fear  of  poverty,  so,  also,  in 
many  families  children  are  not  born,  or  come  into 
life  cruelly  handicapped,  because  of  the  effects  of 
industry  upon  the  health  of  the  mothers  while,~as 
young  girls  and  young  women,  they  worked  Jor 
wages.  Sterility  among  working  class  wives, 
caused  by  protracted  standing  while  at  work  in 
their  girlhood,  is  a  source  of  apprehension  among 
physicians  whose  practice  brings  wage-earning 
women  patients  under  observation.  Sir  Thomas 

*  Obviously,  the  final  simplification  of  the  vexed  problem 
of  widows'  pensions  lies  in  the  direction  of  keeping  fathers 
alive,  in  good  health  and  at  work. 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      15 

Oliver,  the  learned  and  sympathetic  English  stu- 
dent of  American  industry  from  the  medical  point 
of  view,  recently  published,  after  a  journey  among 
American  factories,  a  warning  as  to  the  effect  on 
the  future  of  the  Republic  of  the  employment  of 
so  many  young  women  in  manufacture. 

The  absence  from  home  at  night  of  thousands  of 
young  girls  in  the  telephone  service  has  become  a 
matter  of  course.  Seventy-five  per  cent,  of  these 
young  workers  at  night  are  at  the  age  of  18  years, 
according  to  the  latest  official  report  of  this  state. 
Sleep  lost  at  night  cannot  be  made  up  by  day  by 
people  who  live  in  the  industrial  districts  of  any 
city.  What  nation  ever  before  took  it  for  granted 
that  thousands  of  young  girls  18  years  old  should, 
in  the  way  of  earning  their  bread,  be  away  from 
home  at  night?  This  employment  of  young  girls 
may  well  be  taken  as  an  index  of  cynicism  of  pub- 
lic opinion  which  accepts,  under  the  corrupting  in- 
fluence of  industry,  such  disintegration  of  the 
family  as  inevitable. 

The  field  of  employment  constantly  widens  in 
which  wives  are  expected  to  earn  wages,  as  in  to- 
bacco factories,  laundries,  cigar  making,  the  gar- 
ment trades,  and  the  textiles.  It  is  no  longer  es- 
pecially characteristic  of  any  part  of  the  country 
(as  the  cotton  mill  regions  of  New  England)  or 
of  any  one  industry  (as  the  textiles)  that  women 


16      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

continue  wage  earning  after  marriage.  The  cus- 
tom tends  to  become  universal.  Industry  now 
counts  upon  having  not  only  men  and  girls — as 
was  for  some  generations  characteristic  of  Amer- 
ican manufacture — but  married  women  as  well. 
Girls  marry  with  the  knowledge  that  as  wives  they 
will  have  to  work  for  wages,  and  accept  it  as  the 
will  of  God,  or  the  course  of  Nature,  when  in 
their  families  babies  die. 

Family  life  in  the  home  is  sapped  in  its  foun- 
•  dations  when  the  mothers  of  young  children  work 
for  wages.  Yet  each  Census  shows  a  greater  num- 
ber of  cities  where  married  women  are  so  em- 
ployed and  infant  mortality  ranges  high.  In  Fall 
River,  the  characteristic  textile  manufacturing 
city  of  New  England,  not  only  is  the  general  death 
rate  higher  than  in  any  other  city  of  the  same 
size,  but  infant  mortality  in  particular  reaches  an 
appalling  figure.*  This  has  been  the  history  of 
the  textile  industries  wherever  they  have  been  de- 
veloped— in  Germany,  in  England,  in  this  coun- 
try— a  high  infant  death  rate  has  been  their  by- 
-product. The  double  task  laid  upon  mothers  in 
such  industrial  communities  is  more  than  they 
can  perform,  and  the  babies  pay  the  penalty  with 
their  lives. 

*  Census  of  1910,  and  Federal  Report  on  the  Conditions  of 
Labor  of  Woman  and  Child  Wage-Earners. 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      17 

The  fact  is  moreover  increasingly  conspicuous 
that,  in  working  class  districts  of  manufacturing 
cities,  the  death  rate  of  infants  is  far  in  excess  of 
that  in  regions  inhabited  by  prosperous  people  in 
the  same  cities.  The  children  are  consumed,  di- 
rectly or  indirectly,  in  the  process  of  producing 
goods,  and  this  while  they  are  within  the  closest 
embrace  of  the  family,  before  they  are  old  enough 
for  the  kindergarten. 

Throughout  all  civilization  wages  in  industries 
which  employ  married  women  tend  to  range  so 
low  that  only  when  the  whole  family  is  drawn  into 
wage  earning  can  a  subsistence  be  earned.  In  this 
country  it  is  relatively  new,  but  here,  as  else- 
where, when  the  textile  industries  develop,  this 
disintegration  proceeds  conspicuously.  Except 
that  men  in  the  occupation  are  largely  supplanted 
by  their  own  wives  and  children,  it  might  truth- 
fully be  said  that  the  family  is  bodily  transferred 
from  the  home  to  the  mill. 

When  wives  are  engaged  in  night  work,  the  ef- 
fect is  devastating.  Yet  in  the  cotton  mills  of  the 
southern  states  such  work  is  not  exceptional,  it  is 
a  commonplace  part  of  the  life  of  many  mill  com- 
munities. 


18      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

Withdrawal  of  Children  from  Homes 

In  most  industrially  developed  states  the  com- 
munity says  to  the  parent:  "You  may  not  let 
your  child  work  (except  as  a  newsboy)  before  its 
14th  birthday.  You  must  keep  your  child  in 
school  at  least  until  that  birthday,  and  beyond  it 
unless  the  child  meets  certain  fixed  requirements 
as  to  stature,  health  and  ability  to  read  and  write 
English^  You  must,  moreover,  feed  and  clothe 
your  boy  or  girl  according  to  a  minimum  set  for 
you  by  usage.  Failing  in  these  things,  appro- 
priate penalties  await  you,  among  which  is  sheer 
deprivation  of  the  guardianship  of  your  child." 

In  New  York  State  38,000  children  are  main- 
tained in  institutions,  paid  for  out  of  taxes,  be- 
cause their  natural  guardians  fail  to  meet  these 
requirements.  Few  of  these  institutions  are 
schools  in  any  true  sense.  Fewer  still  are  colonies 
for  the  care  of  afflicted  children  for  whom  segre- 
gation is  needed — the  mentally  deficient,  or  ad- 
vanced cases  of  tuberculosis.  In  the  main  they 
are  free  municipal  boarding  houses,  communist 
institutions  in  which  various  religious  sects  at- 
tempt the  task,  financed  out  of  taxes,  of  bringing 
up  children  by  wholesale.  Undesirable  though  it 
is,  this  undertaking  constitutes  at  present  the  sole 
official  attempt  of  state  or  city  to  eke  out  the  ef- 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      19 

forts  of  parents  who  fail,  under  the  pressure  of 
industry,  to  meet  modern  requirements. 

Institutional  care  is,  however,  an  attempt  to 
substitute  charity  for  justice,  necessary  so  long  as 
industry  does  not  pay  its  debts  to  the  disabled 
and  the  bereft. 

The  stern  pressure  upon  parents  has  led  to  a 
nation-wide  agitation  for  public  pensions  for 
widows,  mothers'  pensions  or  "funds  to  parents" 
acts.  And  states,  cities  and  charitable  organiza- 
tions now  vie  with  each  other  in  assuring  us  that 
no  child  need  be  undernourished,  or  unfitted  for 
school  life  by  reason  of  destitution.* 

Even  more  numerous  than  the  families  whose 
breadwinners  are  dead  or  disabled  are  those  whose 
able-bodied  fathers,  working  in  underpaid  indus- 
tries for  an  insufficient  annual  income,  cannot  sup- 
port the  children  as  the  community  demands. 
These  account,  perhaps  more  than  all  other  influ- 
ences combined  for  the  exodus  from  home  to  mill 
and  mine  of  boys  and  girls  who  should  still  be 
school  children. 

There  is  a  tremendous  and  growing  draft  of 
children  out  of  the  home  into  industry.  In  1912 
in  New  York  City  alone  42,000  children,  boys  and 

*The  change  of  attitude  on  this  subject  in  the  brief  period 
since  the  appearance  of  Robert  Hunter's  volume  on  Poverty 
is  striking. 


20     Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

girls  below  the  age  of  16  years,  were  given  work- 
ing papers.  In  all  history  this  is  new.  Never  be- 
fore this  modern  industrial  era  did  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  young  girls  and  boys  in  a  single  city  enter 
upon  industry  away  from  all  control  by  parents 
or  by  responsible  masters  under  some  form  of  reg- 
ulated indenture.  Regularly  each  year,  in  this 
city  alone,  more  than  forty  thousand  boys  and 
girls  enter  as  independent  units  into  the  world  of 
labor. 

The  law  authorizes  the  father  and  mother  to 
collect  wages  of  minor  children.  But  the  employer 
has  no  responsibility  for  getting  the  wage  into  the 
hands  of  parents.  Nor  is  there  any  responsibility 
upon  employers  for  the  health  and  morals  of  these 
young  workers.  No  one  who  has  not  lived  long 
in  the  foreign  colonies  can  estimate  what  it  means 
to  an  immigrant  parent,  when  a  boy  decides  that 
he  will  no  longer  acknowledge  a  duty  to  his  par- 
ents and  brothers  and  sisters,  will  no  longer  carry 
home  his  wages.  In  serving  on  a  scholarship  com- 
mittee it  is  startling  to  read  in  the  family  record 
that  there  are  two  older  brothers  or  two  older  sis- 
ters, who  recognize  no  duty  toward  their  parents 
or  the  younger  child — the  candidate  for  a  scholar- 
ship— who  is  left  to  suffer  hardship  or  to  accept 
charity.  We  acquiesce  very  generally  in  the  loss 
of  the  sense  of  duty  toward  the  family  on  the 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      21 

part  of  sons  and  daughters  because  industry  has 
habituated  us,  and  tempted  them,  to  consider  the 
worker  as  an  isolated  unit,  regardless  of  family 
ties. 

The  House  as  the  Home 

Our  traditional  national  ideal  of  family  life  in- 
cludes owning  a  home,  or  entering  upon  the  task 
of  acquiring  one. 

Modern  industry  achieves  for  business  uses  the 
forty  stories  of  the  Metropolitan  Tower  and  the 
fifty  floors  of  the  Woolworth  Building,  cheering 
the  eyes  of  the  city  with  their  beauty.  But  for 
the  homes  of  families  who  work  there  is  main- 
tained— and  urgently  needed — a  nationwide  cru- 
sade for  a  minimum  standard  of  construction. 
Philanthropy  is  not  yet  nobly  striving  to  establish 
among  working  people  lofty  ideals  of  healthful- 
ness,  beauty  and  comfort,  in  homes  wherein  a 
worthy  life  may  be  lived  and  childhood  may  spend 
its  years  in  care-free  play.  Far  from  it,  we  are 
still  amply  occupied  in  striving  through  philan- 
thropic effort  and  penal  statutes  to  establish  mini- 
mum standards  below  which  none  may  descend. 

In  one-room  log  cabins  among  cotton  fields  in 
Georgia  and  the  Carolinas,  in  fifty-family  tene- 
ments in  New  York  City,  and  in  the  repellent 
shacks  of  miners'  families  in  a  dozen  mining  states, 


22      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

the  irony  is  the  same.  Families  who  work  are  so 
ill  housed  that  it  is  a  problem  of  self-defence  for 
civilization  to  set  a  lowest  level  beneath  which  no 
southern  plantation  owner,  no  mining  company, 
no  jerry-building  city  landlord  may  offer  so-called 
"homes/' 

Recently  I  had  occasion  to  come  up  from  Jack- 
sonville, Florida,  through  Georgia,  the  Carolinas, 
and  part  of  Virginia  by  day.  Every  new  cotton 
mill  along  the  railway  is  costlier,  more  modern, 
and  better  equipped  than  the  last.  But  nothing 
could  be  more  discouraging  than  the  monotonous 
homes  surrounding  those  mills.  We  have  no  dig- 
nified ideal  of  family  homes  for  wage-earning  fam- 
ilies. The  farm  houses  of  an  older  generation, 
owned  by  their  occupants,  austere  in  their  sim- 
plicity, had  at  least  a  certain  dignity.  It  is  ap- 
palling that  American  people  who  leave  the  farms 
acquiesce  in  living  in  the  homes  provided  for 
them  in  the  industrial  centres  by  the  industry  of 
to-day. 

Everywhere,  the  world  over,  those  who  would 
build  wholesome  and  beautiful  houses  for  work- 
ing families,  and  keep  them  free  from  invasion  by 
industry,  are  confronted  by  an  insoluble  problem. 
Everywhere  this  problem  consists  of  the  same  two 
factors — the  low  family  income  of  laborers,  and 
the  monopoly  power  of  landowners  to  make  their 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      23 

own  terms  for  selling,  leasing,  renting  land  for 
homes. 

In  New  York  and  Chicago,  in  congested  dis- 
tricts where  overcrowding  is  a  perennial  source  of 
disease,  I  have  for  more  than  20  years  observed 
the  landlords  resisting  every  attempt  to  raise  the 
standard  of  workmen's  city  dwellings.  In  New 
York,  after  generations  of  tenement  house  reform, 
the  number  of  sunless  rooms  constantly  increases. 
Every  new  tenement  is  larger,  built  to  shelter  more 
people  than  the  house  which  it  displaces.  Infants 
and  young  children — the  tenderest,  most  perish- 
able members  of  the  family — succumb  most 
quickly  to  the  enfeebling  influence  of  sunless 
dwellings,  overcrowding  and  bad  air.  And  the 
survivors  carry  with  them  through  life  the  effects 
upon  body  and  character  of  this  bad  beginning. 
Overcrowding  and  decency  are  mutually  exclusive. 

Overcrowding  in  tenements  arises  in  part  from 
the  fact  that,  among  unskilled  workers,  the  small 
and  irregular  family  wage  compels  the  choice  to 
be  made  between  food  and  rent.  The  question 
forever  confronting  the  unskilled  laborer's  family 
is:  "Shall  we  have  more  food  and  less  space?" 
If  the  decision  is  in  favor  of  more  food,  a  lodger 
or  boarder  is  commonly  added  to  the  already  large 
number  of  occupants  of  the  flat,  with  all  the  de- 
moralization and  danger  arising  from  the  presence 


24      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

of  an  outsider,  a  non-member  of  the  family.  A 
neighbor  of  mine,  a  tailor  out  of  work,  took  in  a 
man  who  shared  the  bed  of  the  youngest  son.  The 
little  boy  acquired,  after  a  single  night,  an  infec- 
tion which  left  him  hopelessly,  incurably  blind. 

These  facts  are  all  well  known,  the  story  of  the 
tenements  and  their  dwellers  has  long  been  thread- 
bare, the  effort  to  deal  with  them  has  long  been 
a  weariness  to  the  flesh.  The  tenements  persist 
and  increase  from  generation  to  generation.  This 
is  precisely  the  reason  for  presenting  them  once 
more — this  sinister  circumstance  that,  in  spite  of 
the  teachings  of  modern  science  and  the  efforts 
to  apply  modern  hygiene  to  every  relation  of  life, 
overcrowded  tenements  are  still  here,  and  New 
York  City  still  suffers,  in  the  Borough  of  Man- 
hattan, the  densest  congestion  of  population  in 
the  history  of  the  world.  And  this  in  spite  of  all 
the  wealth  created  by  modern  industry. 

The  explanation  is  to  be  found  in  the  control 
of  industry  itself  over  the  minds  of  reformers 
and  of  the  authorities.  It  is,  indeed,  industry 
which  calls  people  to  the  congested  centres  by  its 
offer  of  varied  work.*  It  is  the  Allied  Real  Estate 
industry,  the  brokers,  the  builders,  the  speculators 
in  land  and  shelter,  who  constitute  the  active 

*We  have  no  coherent  policy,  in  any  state,  calculated  to 
draw  population  away  from  congested  city  districts. 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      25 

enemy  to  housing  progress,  just  as  it  is  manufac- 
turing industry  which  calls  little  girls  from  school 
to  factory,  and  commercial  industry  which  sells 
foul  milk  to  be  fed  to  babies. 

To  deal  with  modern  real  estate  industry  in 
this  unlovely  role  of  obstacle  to  progress  we  have 
had,  hitherto,  only  little  groups  of  reformers  ap- 
plying little  remedies.  And  the  continuance  of 
the  evil  witnesses  our  failure. 

Alone  in  all  the  world,  our  reformers  discuss 
houses  as  though  they  were  balloons,  or  biplanes, 
or  clouds  floating  aloft  unrelated  to  the  land  on 
which  they  stand,  unaffected  by  taxation,  de- 
tached from  the  whole  plan  of  the  city  of  which 
they  form  so  essential  and  injurious  a  part.  For 
generations  our  reformers  have  continued  to  do 
this,  untaught  by  failure,  unstirred  by  the  experi- 
ments of  other  cities  in  other  lands. 

The  comprehensive  national  policy  of  Australia 
and  New  Zealand,  applied  to  distributing  popula- 
tion, is  too  well  known  and  too  elaborate  to  be 
summarized  within  the  limits  of  a  lecture.  In 
our  neighboring  country,  Canada,  Vancouver  has 
untaxed  all  buildings  by  way  of  placing  a  premium 
upon  constructing  more  of  them.  England  ex- 
hibits— besides  all  the  changes  arising  from  the 
Lloyd-George  land  taxes — encouraging  experi- 
ments in  the  Garden  Cities,  in  corporate  owner- 


26      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

ship  of  land  for  the  common  good  of  the  inhabi- 
tants. Port  Sunlight  and  Bournemouth  are  fa- 
miliar examples  and  others,  less  well  known,  are 
growing  up  in  many  parts  of  England.  In  Ger- 
many, Frankfort  and  Ulm  have  for  a  quarter 
century  been  acquiring  land,  in  their  municipal 
capacity,  for  the  express  purpose  of  housing  work- 
ing people  in  homes  satisfactory  to  them. 

We,  meanwhile,  still  putter  along  with  prohi- 
bitions and  regulations  upon  owners,  builders, 
speculators  whom  we  accept  as  inevitable.  We 
seem  unteachable,  refractory  to  enlightenment 
drawn  from  our  own  experience  of  failure,  or  from 
the  stimulating  examples  to  be  found  in  other 
lands. 

Why  have  we  no  permanent  Federal  Commis- 
sion on  Homes? 

Invasion  of  the  Home  by  Manufacture 

In  New  York  City,  the  greatest,  richest  centre 
of  modern  industry  in  the  Western  Hemisphere, 
the  home,  the  house,  the  tenement — far  from 
sheltering  the  family  and  belonging  to  it,  con- 
sumes the  family.  The  tenement  house  is  pro- 
verbially a  breeding  place  of  tuberculosis  and 
other  social  diseases.  The  high  cost  of  land  leads 
to  congestion  of  buildings,  and  this  in  turn  to 
insufficient  light,  air  and  space  for  the  family 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      27 

dwelling.  To  earn  a  share  of  the  rent  for 
cramped,  unwholesome  quarters,  mothers  are 
withdrawn  from  household  work,  and,  children 
stay  from  school.  They  are  drawn  into  industry, 
and  the  kitchen  and  bedroom  become  their  work- 
places. 

The  assumption  universally  underlies  women's 
wages  that  there  is  always  a  male  breadwinner 
successfully  performing  his  allotted  task,  and  any 
earnings  of  wife  and  daughter  are  pin  money 
added  to  his  steady  income.  In  fact,  however,  in 
the  chaos  of  modern  industry,  the  male  adult 
breadwinner — father  or  older  brother — happens 
with  tragic  frequency  to  be  dead,  killed  outright 
perhaps  by  his  work — a  railway  accident,  a  Ti- 
tanic disaster,  a  mine  collapse.  Or  he  may  be 
gradually  poisoned  by  the  materials  of  his  work, 
or  exhausted  by  its  processes.  He  may  be  over- 
borne by  the  temptations  of  alcohol,  predisposed 
to  them  by  fatigue.  Or  he  may  be  alive  and 
strong  in  body,  mind  and  morals,  but  condemned 
by  the  nature  of  his  employment  to  long  and  re- 
curring idleness  without  income.  Irregularity  of 
work  and  earnings  is  a  characteristic  experience 
of  modern  industrial  life.  In  these  cases  the  nor- 
mal arrangement  is  inverted,  and  industry  in- 
vades the  home  in  search  of  the  labor  of  the  crip- 
pled, the  bedridden,  and  the  mothers  of  little 


28     Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

children.  Thus  because  industry  has  developed, 
bringing  in  its  train  underpay,  irregularity,  dis- 
ease and  death,  and  because  our  industrial  code 
does  not  yet  protect  the  family,  widows  and  young 
children  are  forced  to  take  upon  themselves  the 
burden  of  manufacture  in  the  home  under  the 
sweating  system. 

The  cruel  old  decision  of  the  Court  of  Appeals 
of  New  York  still  stands  unchanged  since  the 
Jacobs  case.  The  manufacturer's  right  to  invade 
with  his  materials  the  homes  of  the  tenement 
dwellers  can  be  restricted  only  when  the  interest 
of  the  health  of  the  public  in  the  restriction  is 
obvious  to  the  Court.  It  was,  therefore,  deemed 
wiser  in  1913,  not  to  include  in  a  list  of  industries 
to  be  banished  by  statute  from  the  tenements 
garments  intended  for  adults!  Children  are  ad- 
mittedly endangered  by  germs  transmitted  in 
tenement  homework.  Any  gain  to  the  family  life 
of  the  workers,  any  freeing  of  their  homes  from 
invasion  by  industry,  must  be  clearly  subordinate 
to  safeguarding  the  health  of  purchasers,  lest  the 
Court  hold  the  new  law  contrary  to  the  constitu- 
tion. 

Ownership  of  the  Home 

Incredible  sacrifices  have  been  made  by  mil- 
lions of  families  for  the  sake  of  home  ownership. 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      29 

As  long  ago  as  the  days  of  Martin  Chuzzlewit, 
Charles  Dickens  revealed  a  painful  aspect  of  the 
real  estate  gambling  which  has  preyed  upon  this 
effort. 

More  recently,  great  manufacturing  corpora- 
tions in  villages  and  small  cities  have  developed 
from  this  an  effective  trap,  encouraging  employes 
to  buy  homes,  and  so  chaining  them  to  the  spot. 
The  owners  of  homes  partly  paid  for  dare  not 
strike,  lest  they  lose  all  the  payments  they  have 
made.  In  Auburn,  in  1913,  the  Harvester  Works 
threatened  its  striking  employes  that  the  works 
might  be  permanently  removed.  That  would 
mean  the  loss  of  the  employes'  whole  investment 
in  Auburn,  a  city  of  homes. 

An  opposite  method  of  attaining  the  same  end 
is  the  generation  long  policy  of  coal-carrying 
roads  and  coal  companies,  in  Pennsylvania  and 
West  Virginia,  where  the  workers  are  perforce 
tenants  of  their  employers.  In  Westmoreland, 
Pennsylvania,  the  evicted  striking  miners  lived 
for  months  in  tents  lent  them  by  other  working 
men  in  the  hard  winter  and  late  spring  of  1912. 
In  the  winter  and  spring  of  1913  a  similar  experi- 
ence has  befallen  the  miners  in  West  Virginia. 
Whole  communities,  evicted  by  coal  companies, 
have  camped  in  tents  lent  them  by  the  minework- 
ers'  union.  Evicted  wives  and  newborn  babies  of 


30     Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

skilled  miners  died  of  cold  and  exposure  in  the 
midst  of  the  coal  fields — a  grewsome  irony  of 
modern  industry. 

By  their  onslaughts  on  the  family  life  of  min- 
ers the  coal  mining  companies  and  the  coal  carry- 
ing roads  may  contribute  to  end  the  private  own- 
ership of  coal  mines,  to  make  coal  a  national  pos- 
session, and  coal  mining  and  coal  carrying  a  na- 
tional service. 

Having  thus  briefly  and  fragmentarily  indicated 
the  disintegrating  effect  of  modern  industry  upon 
the  family  as  exemplified  in  the  experience  of 
fathers,  mothers,  children,  young  daughters  work- 
ing at  night,  and  the  home  itself  (in  the  sense  of 
physical  shelter),  there  remains — underlying  all 
family  life — the  means  of  subsistence. 

The  Wage  Scale 

In  a  steadily  growing  proportion  of  the  Ameri- 
can nation,  the  economic  foundation  of  the  family 
is  the  wage  scale.  While  our  ideal  of  the  home 
remains  agricultural  we  have  become,  also,  an 
industrial  people  largely  dependent  upon  wages. 
And  the  wage  scale  in  private  industry  we  have 
left  to  be  determined  by  the  play  of  competition. 

A  single  fact  brought  to  light  last  year  illumines 
ironically  the  relation  of  modern  industry  to  the 
wage  earning  family.  Dr.  Caroline  Hedger,  of  the 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      31 

Chicago  University  Settlement,  discovered  that 
children  in  the  neighborhood  of  the  Chicago 
stockyards  are  fed  coffee  because  their  parents 
cannot  afford  milk  for  them.  Fathers  and  moth- 
ers who  spend  their  lives  in  killing  cattle  and 
packing  meat,  to  feed  this  nation  and  Europe, 
cannot  afford  for  their  own  children  milk  in  in- 
fancy. In  the  midst  of  more  cows  than  are 
brought  together  anywhere  else,  babies  are  fed 
coffee  for  its  cheapness.  The  railroads'  profit  on 
hauling  milk  to  the  city,  the  milk  trust's  dividend 
derived  from  distributing  milk  in  the  stockyards 
district,  the  milk  retailers'  profit  upon  their  share 
of  this  work,  and  the  meagre  wage  paid  to  men 
and  women  who  prepare  a  staple  food  for  adults, 
together  result  in  robbing  these  babies  altogether 
of  their  most  necessary  food. 

Competitive  determination  of  wage  scales  is 
less  endurable  from  decade  to  decade.  Therefore 
we  see  our  fellow  citizens  swarming  into  the  fed- 
eral civil  service  in  quest  of  permanent  salaries, 
and  into  state  and  city  employments  lured  by  the 
twofold  attraction  of  permanent  employment  and 
retiring  pensions,  however  modest  both  may  be. 
Or  they  seek  arbitration  of  their  wage  disputes 
under  the  Erdman  Act,  or  demand  the  creation 
of  minimum  wage  boards,  at  least  for  women  and 
minors. 


32     Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

Why  do  we  Americans  not  frankly  copy  the 
good  democratic  method  worked  out  by  the  Aus- 
tralians since  1896,  and  adopted  with  some  modi- 
fications in  England  since  1910?  They  create  in 
an  underpaid  industry  a  board  composed  of  rep- 
resentatives, elected  by  employers  and  by  em- 
ployes, who  meet  and  consider  payrolls  and  the 
cost  of  living.  In  the  full  light  of  publicity  these 
representatives  of  the  parties  in  interest  arrive  at 
an  agreement  which,  if  approved  by  the  appro- 
priate supervising  authority,  is  thereafter  binding 
upon  both  for  an  agreed  time.  At  the  end  of  the 
time,  either  side  may  ask  for  a  change  and  the 
negotiations  may  begin  anew. 

Our  American  spirit  in  relation  to  such  legisla- 
tion is  undemocratic.  Although  minimum  wage 
laws  are  intended  to  confirm  the  economic  foun- 
dation of  the  family  and  check  the  process  of  dis- 
integration, the  members  of  families  most  con- 
cerned are  not  necessarily  to  be  consulted  accord- 
ing to  our  present  initial  statutes. 

Men  are  omitted  from  these  new  laws  upon  an 
arbitrary  assumption  that  the  laws  would  be  un- 
constitutional if  applied  to  men.  Why  do  we 
Americans  refuse  to  face  the  fact  that  women  and 
minors  are  earning  wages  primarily  because  of 
underpaid  husbands  and  fathers,  who  would  gladly 
keep  their  wives  at  home  and  their  children  in 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      83 

school?  That  it  is  precisely  in  the  interest  of  the 
family  that  the  wages  of  men  should  be  regu- 
lated? 

Our  new  statutes  do  not,  as  in  Australia,  usu- 
ally provide  for  election  of  members  of  the  boards, 
a  safeguard  of  the  interests  of  wageworkers,  which 
experience  has  shown  to  be  useful.  Unhappily, 
this  new  institution  of  wage  boards  thus  tends,  in 
one  state  after  another,  to  become  an  eleemosy- 
nary arrangement  confined  to  women  and  minors, 
instead  of  a  democratic  method  of  constraining 
industry  to  pay  its  just  debts  from  week  to  week, 
to  afford  an  honest  and  sufficient  family  liveli- 
hood to  all  people,  men  and  women  alike,  who  do 
honest  work.  Why  do  we  not,  at  the  beginning 
of  public  regulation  of  wages,  strengthen  the  eco- 
nomic foundations  of  family  life  by  providing  that 
men  and  women  may  be  elected  to  represent  their 
fellow  workers,  meeting  upon  wage  boards  the 
representatives  of  employers  (elected  by  the  em- 
ployers), the  whole  group  bringing  to  bear  the 
collective  wisdom  of  all  upon  the  difficult  subject 
of  the  payroll? 

Regenerative  Forces  Within  the  Family 

Within  the  family  itself,  two  regenerative  forces 
are  slowly  becoming  manifest,  the  consumers' 
growing  consciousness  of  power  over  industry, 


34      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

and  the  increasing  numbers  of  enfranchised 
women. 

English,  German,  Belgian  and  Swiss  families 
have  set  an  example  to  the  rest  of  the  world  by 
building  up  cooperative  enterprises,  retail  distri- 
butive at  first,  and  now  spreading  powerfully  in 
the  fields  of  wholesale  distribution  and  manufac- 
ture. Through  these  agencies  cooperating  fami- 
lies lower  prices,  raise  qualities,  and  standardize 
conditions  of  employment  hi  relation  to  the  ar- 
ticles consumed  in  their  homes.  Incidentally  they 
compel  their  non-cooperative  competitors  to  ap- 
proach more  or  less  closely  the  same  improved 
standards. 

England  has  in  its  federated  cooperative  soci- 
eties nearly  three  million  members,  men  and  wom- 
en, whose  capital  amounts  to  more  than  two  and 
a  half  billion  dollars  wholly  invested  in  coopera- 
tive enterprises.  Through  this  movement,  a  large 
proportion  of  the  domestic  consumption  of  the 
families  is  covered. 

The  German  societies  report  a  membership  of 
more  than  five  and  a  half  million,  and  an  annual 
turnover  of  a  billion  and  a  quarter  dollars. 

The  admirable  social  achievement  of  the  Bel- 
gian cooperatives  is  too  well  known  to  require 
more  than  a  passing  reference. 

The  Ninth  International  Cooperative  Congress, 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      35 

held  at  Glasgow  in  1913,  reports  delegates  from 
24  nations,  in  which  there  are  more  than  twenty 
million  members  of  cooperative  societies.  Of 
these  six  millions  are  within  the  bodies  organically 
affiliated  with  the  International  Cooperative  Al- 
liance. 

The  improved  quality  of  the  cooperators  them- 
selves is  increasingly  recognized  as  of  greater  im- 
portance than  their  industrial  achievement. 
Their  self-confidence,  business  ability,  and  active 
participation  in  the  control  of  industry  have  no 
parallel  among  us.  In  using  this  vast  power  at 
their  command  as  consumers,  American  families 
have  strangely  lagged  behind.  Here  is  a  promis- 
ing field  of  activity  ignored  by  those  wives  of  pro- 
fessional men,  and  better  paid  employes,  whose 
economic  activities  have  gone  from  the  home,  and 
whose  enforced  leisure  is  not  altogether  a  source 
of  satisfaction. 

Though  the  vast  majority  of  consumers  are 
themselves  workers — farmers  or  wage  earners — 
they  have  not  yet  generally  perceived  that  the 
tendency  of  the  family  to  disintegrate  has  for  its 
final  cause  the  lost  ownership  of  their  tools  by  the 
workers.  The  civilized  world  is,  however,  gradu- 
ally coming  to  see  that  it  can  never  return  to  the 
primitive  ownership  of  the  agricultural  period. 
The  perception  spreads  from  nation  to  nation  that 


36      Modern  Industry  and  the  Family 

the  growing  control  of  industry  by  those  who  work 
— brain  workers  and  hand  workers — means  hence- 
forth not  direct,  individual  possession,  but  an  im- 
measurable variety  of  forms  of  participation  in 
cooperative  ownership,  public  and  private. 

In  America  voting  women  are  increasing  from 
year  to  year  and  revealing  the  regenerative  power 
of  the  ballot  in  the  service  of  the  family.  Four 
and  a  half  million  women  vote  in  Washington, 
Oregon,  California,  Arizona,  Utah,  Idaho,  Alaska, 
Wyoming,  Colorado,  Kansas,  and  Illinois;  and  in 
thirteen  other  states  the  process  of  enfranchising 
women  will  reach  the  stage  of  referendum  to  the 
voters  before  the  election  of  the  next  President 
in  1916.  Already  wage  earning  women  and  girls 
in  Arizona,  Washington,  California,  Colorado  and 
the  District  of  Columbia  enjoy  the  benefits  of  the 
eight  hours  day;  and  in  Washington,  Oregon, 
Utah,  Colorado,  and  California  minimum  wage 
laws  for  them  have,  with  their  help  as  voters,  been 
enacted,  an  epoch  making  innovation,  even 
though  these  laws  are  still  experimental  and  in 
need  of  improvement.  It  seems  reasonable  to  be- 
lieve that  these  are  mere  intimations  of  the  meas- 
ures of  self-defence  of  the  family  which  are  des- 
tined to  be  established  by  means  of  new  powers 
gradually  being  conferred  upon  women. 

An  infinite  vista  opens  before  the  mind,  of  re- 


Modern  Industry  and  the  Family      37 

generative  power  for  the  restoration  and  progress 
of  the  family  through  the  development  of  coop- 
eration and  community  action  in  the  industrial 
field.  The  era  of  unbridled  power  exercised  by 
irresponsible  industry  at  cost  of  the  family — the 
fundamental  institution  of  the  human  race — is 
slowly  drawing  to  a  close. 

Hence  the  vital  strength  of  the  rapidly  growing 
movement  to  extend  all  devices  of  democratic 
government.  When  the  coming  worldwide  indus-, 
trial  code  for  restoring  and  safeguarding  the  fam- 
ily is  at  length  adopted  in  its  fullness,  it  will  ex- 
press the  will  of  the  adult  people  whom  it  con- 
cerns, men  and  women  together.  In  that  direction 
lies  hope  of  regeneration  of  the  family  under  the 
conditions  created  by  modem  industry. 


II 


MODERN  INDUSTRY  IN  RELATION  TO 
HEALTH 


MODERN    INDUSTRY   AND    HEALTH 

Modern  industry  offers,  in  abundance  new  to 
human  experience,  everything  requisite  for  the 
enjoyment  of  good  health.  It  produces  unmeas- 
ured wealth  in  myriad  forms — food,  clothing, 
shelter,  books,  the  means  of  travel,  recreation  and 
enjoyment. 

For  fighting  disease,  too,  the  arsenal  was  never 
so  well  furnished.  Every  year  we  have  more  hos- 
pitals, more  costly  and  more  splendid,  more  sana- 
toria, more  clinics,  more  medical  schools,  more 
training  schools  for  nurses.  Endowments  for  re- 
search increase  and  the  discoveries  from  their 
laboratories  follow  each  other  in  hope-inspiring 
succession.  Crusades  against  disease  are  carried 
forward,  nationwide  in  scope,  against  tuberculosis, 
infant  mortality,  cancer,  blindness,  the  social  dis- 
eases, and  insanity. 

From  year  to  year  the  social  functions  of  doc- 
tors and  nurses  are  extended.  School  doctors  and 
school  nurses  are  already  an  old  story,  their  bene- 
ficent work  is  recognized  as  indispensable,  and 

41 


42         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

their  ranks  are  now  increased  by  their  colleagues 
attached  to  municipal  milk  stations.  Nursing  the 
poor  in  their  homes  has  been,  for  more  than  a  dec- 
ade, a  municipal  activity  in  Los  Angeles,  and  has 
recently  celebrated  its  twentieth  anniversary  as  a 
voluntary  activity  in  New  York  City.  We  are 
growing  accustomed  to  the  presence  of  nurses  in 
department  stores  and  factories,  to  follow-up 
nurses  from  the  hospitals,  and  to  nursing  in  con- 
nection with  industrial  insurance. 

It  is  the  new  wealth  created  by  modern  indus- 
try which  makes  possible  this  nationwide  war 
upon  disease. 

This  is,  moreover,  only  a  part  of  the  cheerful 
tale.  Industry  affords,  almost  from  day  to  day, 
fresh  resources  for  making  work  healthful  and 
pleasant.  Improvements  in  the  production  of 
concrete,  steel  and  glass,  and  advances  in  engineer- 
ing, make  possible  the  construction  of  factories 
fireproof  and  perfectly  lighted,  ventilated,  and 
heated.  Where  the  outside  air  is  vitiated,  it  can 
be  purified  by  artificial  means  while  it  is  brought 
indoors,  and  this  is  increasingly  done  for  commer- 
cial purposes.  Electrical  vacuum  processes  draw 
off  dust  at  the  point  at  which  it  is  generated,  so 
that  neither  the  particular  workman  engaged  at 
a  machine  hitherto  a  dangerous  dust  generator, 
nor  his  colleague  working  in  the  same  room,  need 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         43 

henceforth  suffer  from  dust.  By  the  use  of  suit- 
able glass  shades,  electric  light  can  now  be  tem- 
pered to  the  human  eye.  Seats  of  all  kinds  and 
heights  are  ready  on  the  market.  The  list  of  re- 
sources made  available  by  industry  itself  for  mak- 
ing work  wholesome  and  agreeable  can  be  pro- 
longed indefinitely. 

Normally  industry  itself  should  be  an  upbuild- 
ing process,  a  daily  benefit  to  mind  and  body  of 
all  who  participate  in  it.  Every  sound  man  and 
woman  is  physically  the  better  for  regular  active 
work.  Rational  exertion  with  moderate  leisure, 
and  assured  livelihood  without  worry  about  daily 
bread,  naturally  conduce  to  good  health.  And  for 
all  these  things  modern  industry  amply  provides 
the  raw  materials.  Never  before  were  the  techni- 
cal conditions  so  favorable  for  assuring  to  all  who 
work  reasonably  short  hours  (to  avoid  the  stupe- 
fying effects  of  monotony  and  speeding)  cheering 
rewards,  and  the  consciousness  of  useful  service. 

With  the  help  of  modern  hygiene  and  prevent- 
ive medicine,  enriched  by  all  the  new  resources, 
we  ought  to  be  living  in  vigor  and  enjoyment  on 
our  seventieth  birthdays,  unless  we  are  cut  down 
by  the  enemy  in  the  form  of  inoperable  cancer, 
or  some  obscure  disease  of  the  heart,  or  by  one  of 
the  mysterious  maladies  whose  secrets  science  has 
not  yet  laid  bare.  Indeed,  Professor  Metschni- 


44         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

koff  has  long  encouraged  us  to  hope  that  our  great- 
grandchildren may  live  in  physical  vigor  far  be- 
yond the  century  mark.  And  certain  life  insur- 
ance companies  are  collecting  data  about  cen- 
tenarian policy  holders. 

At  present,  however,  the  average  age  at  death 
of  the  American  people,  in  the  registration  area, 
is  approximately  47  years  instead  of  the  Biblical 
three  score  years  and  ten,  or  the  140  years  held 
out  to  the  hopes  of  our  successors  by  the  head  of 
the  Pasteur  Institute. 

Disease  and  Death  By-products  of  Industry 

It  is  the  paradox  of  modern  industry  in  relation 
to  health  that,  while  producing  the  wealth  which 
enriches  medical  institutions  and  sustains  the  pro- 
fessions of  scientific  research,  medicine  and  nurs- 
ing, it  gives  rise  to  a  considerable  part  of  the  dis- 
ease which  they  strive  to  cure,  and  the  deaths 
which  they  aim  to  defer.  Avoidable  disease  and 
premature  death  are  among  its  regular  by-prod- 
ucts, and  it  exhausts  ever  widening  ranges  of 
working  people.  It  exerts  a  continuous  injurious 
influence  upon  masses  of  those  who  consume  its 
products,  or  work  in  its  service. 

These  sinister  facts  have  been  slow  to  attract 
widespread  attention  because  we  lack  the  two 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         45 

essential  sources  of  knowledge  about  them — vital 
statistics  and  insurance  records. 

We  are  the  one  great  nation  without  vital  sta- 
tistics. We  do  not  know  how  many  children  are 
born  each  year  in  our  Republic,  or  how  many 
people  die. 

The  first  service  of  the  federal  Children's  Bureau 
in  the  initial  year  of  its  activity  consists  in  forc.- 
ing  upon  the  attention  of  the  nation  the  fact  that, 
of  our  forty-eight  states,  only  eight  register  births 
in  accordance  with  the  standard  set  by  the  Federal 
Census  Bureau.*  These  are  the  New  England 
states  with  Pennsylvania  and  Michigan.  In  New 
York  the  vital  statistics  are  good  enough  to  bring 
the  city  within  the  registration  area.  But  it  is 
easier  to  get  birth  certificates  for  little  Turks  born 
in  Turkey,  than  for  American  children  born  in 
the  rural  counties  of  New  York  State  when  the 
children  apply  for  "working  papers,"  and  their 
birth  certificates  are  their  first  requisite. 

After  the  vital  statistics  which  we  lack,  the  sec- 
ond available  source  of  exact  knowledge  of  the 

*  These  states  were  admitted  to  the  "provisional  registration 
area."  Not  all  of  them  have  complete  registration.  New 
laws  go  into  effect  (1914)  in  Arkansas,  North  Carolina,  and 
Tennessee,  and  amendments  in  some  other  states.  It  is  not 
possible  to  say  whether  their  results  will  be  satisfactory  until 
they  have  had  sufficient  time  to  give  a  fair  test,  there  are  so 
many  conditions  affecting  the  completeness  of  returns. 


46         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

relation  of  disease  to  industry  would  be  the  records 
of  social  insurance  such  as  Germany  has  been  ac- 
cumulating throughout  a  quarter  century.  In 
the  coal  mining  areas  and  textile  manufacturing 
districts  in  Germany,  the  births  and  deaths  of 
children,  and  the  age  at  death,  and  causes  of 
death,  of  their  fathers  are  known  through  vital 
statistics  and  social  insurance  records.  The  rela- 
tive dangers  to  life  and  health  in  these  two  great 
industries  can,  therefore,  be  accurately  traced. 

For  the  corresponding  coal  mining  areas  of 
West  Virginia  and  textile  manufacturing  districts 
of  New  Jersey,  we  know  nothing  trustworthy  as 
to  birth,  death,  health  or  disease  of  children  or 
parents.  So,  too,  in  regard  to  the  stockyards  re- 
gion of  Chicago,  the  second  city  of  the  nation. 
Although  it  is  a  matter  of  common  knowledge  that 
children  born  in  that  part  of  the  city  die  in  great 
numbers  very  young,  we  have  no  scientific,  official 
statement. 

After  a  nationwide  crusade  lasting  ten  years, 
we  have  no  adequate  registration  of  a  disease  so 
omnipresent  as  tuberculosis. 

We  have  no  national  policy  with  regard  to 
health,  and  no  scientific  basis  for  the  adoption  of 
such  a  policy.  The  absence  of  vital  statistics  in- 
dicates correctly  our  national  indifference  to  the 
;whole  subject.  Indeed,  in  recent  years  an  effort 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         47 

to  create  a  federal  Department  of  Health  with  a 
representative  in  the  Cabinet  has  called  forth  hor- 
rifying opposition. 

Under  these  circumstances  of  national  indiffer- 
ence to  life  and  health,  our  belated  state  in  regard 
to  social  insurance  follows  naturally.  The  first 
American  conference  on  the  subject  occurred  in 
1913,  and  the  tenth  biennial  meeting  of  the  Inter- 
national Conference,  which  will  be  held  in  the 
United  States  in  1915,  will  be  the  first  session  held 
in  this  country.  Social  insurance  records  are, 
thus,  for  us  wholly  a  hope  for  the  future. 

All  these  difficulties  being  duly  recognized,  it  is 
still  true  that,  at  least  within  the  registration  area, 
we  know  enough  in  regard  to  deaths  to  venture 
certain  conclusions.  Among  these  the  most  im- 
portant is  that,  within  that  area,  the  death  rate 
is  too  slowly  declining,  the  average  life  is  too 
slowly  lengthening.* 

After  living  more  than  twenty  years  in  working 
class  districts  of  two  leading  industrial  cities,  New 
York  and  Chicago,  I  am  impressed  with  the  deadly 
effects,  in  working  class  families,  of  two  active 
continuing  influences — the  bad  food  supply,  and 
the  ignorant  mothers  in  relation  to  that  supply. 
Whatever  progress  has  been  achieved  in  prolong- 
ing human  life  by  reducing  mortality  of  infants 


48         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

and  young  children  is  due  to  efforts  directly  coun- 
teracting these  agencies. 

Commercialized  Food 

In  certain  cities  charitable  societies  and  boards 
of  health  afford,  through  a  limited  number  of  milk 
stations,  supplies  especially  provided  for  the  chil- 
dren of  the  poor  and  warranted  not  to  kill  or  in- 
jure them.  But  for  the  general  supply  consumed 
by  families  who  are  neither  rich  enough  to  buy 
certified  milk,  nor  poor  enough  for  charity,  we  set 
a  standard  too  low  for  health,  too  high  for  the 
farmers  under  present  railway  charges.  Why  have 
we  not  good  milk  for  all,  since  the  technical  knowl- 
edge necessary  for  obtaining  it  is  now  everywhere 
available? 

A  chief  difficulty  is  an  industrial  one,  the  slow 
service  and  excessive  charges  of  railroads.  These 
discourage  farmers  from  enlarging  their  output, 
and  in  great  measure  spoil  the  product  in  transit, 
by  exposing  it  to  prolonged  heat  in  summer,  and 
by  tempting  shippers  to  drug  milk  with  preserva- 
tives. 

Retail  dealers  constitute  a  second  great  diffi- 
culty in  the  way  of  a  wholesome  urban  milk  sup- 
ply for  all  the  children.  They  keep  up  the  price, 
and  succumb  to  temptation  to  spoil  milk  as  food 
for  babies  by  adding  water  or  preservatives  (for- 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         49 

maldehyde  and  others)  to  their  own  profit.  They 
add  germs  of  malignant  disease  when  milk  is  sold 
in  little  shops  that  are  the  front  rooms  of  dwell- 
ings in  which  there  happens  to  be  illness.  And 
their  dirty  ways  often  add  to  milk  filth  bacteria 
that  are  fatal,  particularly  during  hot  weather, 
to  little  children  and  to  invalids.  Such  hordes  of 
milk  retailers  are  licensed,  that  no  one  can  pos- 
sibly know  how  they  conduct  their  business  day  by 
day  and  hour  by  hour.  Yet  this  is  a  matter  of 
life  and  death  for  children. 

Before  infant  mortality  can  be  reduced  to  its 
possible  minimum,  the  milk  industry  must,  in  the 
interest  of  all  children  in  all  city  homes,  be  munici- 
pal  like  the  water  supply,  and  like  it  safe  and 
abundant.  Although  this  change  obviously  can- 
not be  complete  until  American  railroads  are,  like 
the  Swiss  railroads,  public  servants  of  the  people, 
hopeful  beginnings  exist  in  the  municipal  milk 
stations  of  New  York,  Rochester,  and  a  few  other 
cities. 

Minor  industrial  causes  of  infant  mortality  are 
worthless  baby  foods,  poisonous  soothing  syrups, 
and  long  rubbered  feeding  bottles.  For  children 
a  few  years  older,  at  the  kindergarten  and  primary 
school  age,  industry  purveys  candy,  soda  water 
and  ice-cream  in  which  glue,  lampblack,  glucose, 
sulphurous  acid,  saccharin,  paraffin,  coal-tar  dyes, 


50         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

and  many  poisonous  coloring  matters  are  ingredi- 
ents. It  is  chiefly  boys  and  girls  of  wage  earning 
families  who  buy  them,  often  as  substitutes  for 
regular  meals,  spending  for  them  pennies  left  for 
food  by  a  mother  whose  occupation  keeps  her 
away  from  home  at  meal  times.  Children  who 
buy  these  substitutes  for  food  do  so  habitually. 
Their  appetite  for  wholesome  food  is  cloyed,  their 
digestion  clogged,  and  malnutrition  follows. 

It  is  hard  to  conceive  of  a  city  or  state  produc- 
ing and  distributing  substances  like  these.  And 
the  question,  therefore,  arises  in  behalf  of  the 
most  dependent,  defenceless  members  of  the  com- 
munity, how  long  our  food  supply  is  to  be, en- 
trusted to  adulterators  and  speculators? 

There  is  a  widespread  misapprehension  as  to 
the  degree  of  protection  afforded  to  the  public 
by  the  federal  pure  food  law.  All  the  substances 
above  enumerated  are  debarred  from  interstate 
commerce  if  shipped  for  use  as  food.  But  they 
can  be  legally  manufactured  and  sold  locally,  un- 
less state  laws  or  city  ordinances  against  them  are 
enacted  and  enforced. 

All  these  injurious  articles  are  sold  to  New  York 
City  school  children  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of 
school  buildings.  They  are  manufactured  and 
consumed  within  the  city,  and  therefore  escape 
the  national  pure  food  and  drug  law. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         51 

The  same  exemption  applies  to  tuberculous  milk 
and  meat  if  produced  and  sold  locally.  Every 
state  is  free  to  legislate  or  not  as  it  sees  fit,  and 
every  community  is  a  law  unto  itself  in  the  matter 
of  enforcement.  In  the  whole  country,  only  three 
cities  have  municipal  slaughter  houses.  In  these 
the  city  naturally  determines  the  method  of  pre- 
paring the  meat  supply,  and  the  state  laws  can 
obviously  be  enforced  without  incentive  to  resist- 
ance or  evasion.  If  the  municipal  abattoirs  were 
supplemented  with  city  markets  suitably  placed, 
one  important  element  of  the  food  problem  of 
wage-earning  families  in  those  cities  would  be 
greatly  simplified. 

^  Ignorant  Mothers 

Physicians  and  nurses  working  in  connection 
with  milk  stations  agree  that  their  most  useful 
service  consists  in  educating  mothers  in  the  care 
of  babies  and  young  children.  For  of  what  avail 
is  it  to  get  certified  milk  into  the  tenements,  an 
expensive  and  laborious  process,  if  the  mothers 
then  leave  it  exposed  to  heat,  bad  air  and  flies? 
Or  if  they  continue,  as  before,  to  feed  the  babies 
coffee,  cucumbers  and  pickles? 

The  cause  of  the  mothers'  ignorance  is  usually 
the  insufficient  wage  of  the  family  breadwinner 
which  in  industrial  communities  urges  the  young 


52         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

girls  to  leave  school  from  grades  below  that  in 
which  domestic  science  instruction  even  begins. 
In  the  great  Southern  cotton  manufacturing 
states — in  Georgia,  Alabama,  the  Carolinas — 
where  children  enter  the  mills  exceptionally  at 
seven  and  eight  years,  and  in  great  numbers  at 
eleven  and  twelve,  their  minds  are  not  mature 
enough  to  profit  by  such  instruction  as  future 
mothers  need  for  the  safety  and  welfare  of  their 
children. 

From  the  point  of  view,  however,  of  the  life 
and  health  of  the  next  generation,  the  employment 
of  little  girls  in  mills  is  hardly  more  injurious  than 
the  exhausting  and  stupefying  work  of  older  ones, 
from  fourteen  to  twenty.  An  industrial  Republic 
needs  highly  intelligent  mothers,  capable  of  tak- 
ing care  of  the  health  of  all  the  members  of  the 
family,  of  whom  the  babies  are  merely  the  most 
sensitive  and  perishable.  For  this  reason  the 
public  welfare  requires  that  all  working  girls 
should  be  kept  in  attendance  at  part  time  con- 
tinuation schools  far  beyond  the  present  limit  of 
sixteen  years  of  age,  whatever  modification  of 
workroom  schedules  and  of  existing  curricula  this 
may  involve. 

The  disease  most  common  among  working  peo- 
ple, tuberculosis,  is  cultivated  by  wholesale  in  the 
tenement  home  and  in  the  workroom.  Crowded 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         53 

sleeping  rooms,  broken  rest,  insufficient,  ill  pre- 
pared, unsuitable  food  at  home  cooperate  with 
fatigue,  dust,  strain  in  the  workroom  to  prepare 
the  bodies  of  workers,  particularly  of  the  young, 
to  receive  the  germ  under  circumstances  favorable 
to  its  development.  Nightwork  especially  predis- 
poses the  young  frame  to  welcome  the  plague,  for 
sleep  lost  at  night  cannot  be  made  up  in  a  working 
class  district. 

Tuberculosis  is  a  mass  product  of  modern  in- 
dustry. Yet  in  our  crusade  against  it  we  have, 
hitherto,  used  retail  measures.  The  crusade  has, 
therefore,  no  such  sweeping  reduction  in  cases  to 
report  as  its  founders  hoped  and  foretold  a  decade 
ago.  The  industrial  predisposing  causes  are  all 
still  in  force — poverty,  fatigue,  tuberculous  meat 
and  milk  on  the  market,  bad  housing,  and  conges- 
tion of  population.* 

Wages  and  Health 

The  cost  of  living  has  increased  in  recent  years, 
and  the  standard  of  living  has  fallen,  certainly  for 
the  unskilled,  the  common  laborers. 

*It  will  be  a  matter  of  literally  vital  interest  to  watch 
the  activities  of  the  newly  enfranchised  women  in  San  Fran- 
cisco, Los  Angeles  and  Chicago  as  to  the  public  health  in 
these  aspects — the  care  of  the  food  supply,  the  education  of 
girls  for  family  life,  and  the  solution  of  the  hitherto  insoluble 
housing  problem. 


54         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

In  the  minds  of  working  people  the  world  over 
there  has  never  been  a  doubt  that,  for  their  health, 
the  most  important  consideration  is  the  standard 
of  living,  steady  income,  rational  in  relation  to  the 
cost  of  food,  clothing,  shelter.  Hence  their  in- 
numerable strikes  for  increased  wages. 

Unhappily,  the  workers  have  not  hitherto  con- 
trolled this  relation,  for  how  do  they  profit  by  an 
increased  wage  in  the  cases  in  which  they  succeed 
in  getting  it,  if  the  increase  all  goes  to  the  land- 
lord, the  meat  trust,  the  coal  trust,  the  milkman? 
Without  scientific  distribution  of  the  necessaries 
of  life  as  pure  and  cheap  as  our  existing  technic 
makes  possible,  the  increase  becomes  illusory. 
This  long-delayed  expansion  of  public  functions 
we  are  justified  in  expecting  of  the  new  voters  of 
whom  so  large  a  proportion  are  self-supporting, 
or  the  wives  of  wage-earning  men. 

As  important  for  the  public  health  as  for  the 
restoration  of  the  family  is  the  new  interference 
of  the  public  in  the  determination  of  wages.  It 
has  become  a  matter  of  almost  annual  recurrence 
that  the  federal  government  intervenes  between 
some  large  congeries  of  railroads  and  their  or- 
ganized employes  to  maintain  the  standard  of 
wages.  The  new  state  commissions  on  women's 
wages  are  obviously  destined  to  contribute  to- 
wards preventing  tuberculosis  and  insanity  by 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         55 

assuring  a  livelihood,  however  modest,  to  women 
workers  who  have  proverbially  worked  the  long- 
est hours,  at  the  most  wearing  tasks,  for  the  most 
wretched  pay. 

The  present  conflagration  of  interest  and  alarm 
concerning  the  wages  of  women  and  girls  in  rela- 
tion to  the  public  health  and  morals  was  kindled 
in  greater  degree  than  is  commonly  known  by  the 
modest  little  volume,  Making  Both  Ends  Meet, 
by  Edith  Wyatt  and  Sue  Ainslie  Clark,*  which 
embodied  facts  gathered  directly  from  some  hun- 
dreds of  women  and  girls  living  away  from  their 
families  and  supporting  themselves.  Its  publica- 
tion stimulated  some  of  the  earliest  direct  efforts 
in  this  country  for  wage  legislation. 


i 


Preventable  Dangers  in  Industry 

The  characteristic  of  modern  industry  is  inces- 
sant change.  As  old  processes  are  abandoned  and 
new  ones  introduced,  new  dangers,  new  injurious 
influences  constantly  arise,  and  new  powers  of 
controlling  them  as  well.  Among  the  incidents 
of  industry  varying  from  branch  to  branch,  from 
place  to  place,  are  heat,  cold,  glare,  darkness,  in- 

*Macmillan,  1910.  Miss  Wyatt  is  Vice-President  of  the 
Consumers'  League  of  Illinois,  and  Miss  Ainslie  made  her 
investigation  while  one  of  the  secretaries  of  the  National 
Consumers'  League. 


56         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

sufficient  lighting,  noise,  speeding,  monotony, 
heavy  lifting,  standing,  bad  air,  dampness,  con- 
tact with  poisonous  materials,  dangerous  machin- 
ery, and  processes  generating  dust,  gases  and 
vapors. 

These  industrial  menaces  to  the  health  of  wage- 
earners  are  discussed  in  ever  fresh  editions  of  for- 
eign standard  works  on  industrial  hygiene.  It  is 
a  striking  and  discreditable  fact  that  we  have,  in 
the  United  States,  no  standard  work  on  this  in- 
finitely important  subject.  We  are  dependent 
upon  the  English  writers,  Sir  Thomas  Oliver  and 
Hutchins  and  Harrison,  although,  in  many  impor- 
tant respects,  conditions  are  so  different  in  the  two 
countries  that  these  valuable  works  are  in  part 
inapplicable  here.* 

Indeed,  it  is  only  because  of  the  default  of  sci- 
ence in  this  field  that  a  lay  observer  finds  a  re- 

*The  first  American  monographs  dealing  with  special  as- 
pects of  industrial  disease  are  still  recent,  Dr.  Alice  Hamil- 
ton's studies  of  lead  poisoning,  published  by  the  U.  S.  De- 
partment of  Labor,  and  Dr.  John  B.  Andrews'  investigation 
of  the  use  of  white  sulphur  in  manufacturing  matches. 

Two  valuable  state  reports  dealing  with  more  general 
aspects  of  health  and  industry  are  those  of  the  Mass.  State 
Board  of  Health  (1907)  and  the  more  recent  Illinois  State 
Commission  on  the  Health,  Safety  and  Comfort  of  Em- 
ployes. 

The  New  York  State  Factories  Investigating  Commission, 
also,  in  ita  current  reports  contributes  valuable  data. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         57 

spectful  hearing.  It  is  as  a  lay  observer  that  I 
venture  to  report  the  following  observations  inci- 
dental to  my  work  as  factory  inspector  for  the 
State  of  Illinois,  or  as  visitor  for  the  National 
Consumers'  League,  or  as  one  (for  a  brief  month) 
of  the  members  of  the  staff  of  the  Pittsburgh 
Survey. 

In  Chicago,  at  the  Stockyards,  in  1895,  on  an 
August  day  so  hot  that  three  employes  died  of 
sunstroke,  young  immigrant  boys  were  serving  as 
door-openers  of  the  cooling  rooms.  A  boy  open- 
ing a  door  for  little  electric  trains  carrying  sides 
of  beef,  was — as  the  door  swung  open — exposed 
to  the  scorching  heat  of  the  outside  world.  Then 
— -as  the  train  slowly  passed  him — the  door  swing- 
ing inward — he  returned  to  his  post  inside  the 
cooling  room  where  icicles  hung  from  the  ceiling 
because  that  temperature  was  necessary  for  the 
meat.  All  day  long,  he  oscillated  between  those 
extremes  of  temperature.  Cynical,  indeed,  was 
the  contrast  between  the  provision  for  the  well- 
being  of  the  beef,  and  the  exposure  of  the  immi- 
grant boys  to  pneumonia  or  rheumatism ! 

If  there  is,  to-day,  any  regulation  of  tempera- 
ture at  the  Chicago  Stockyards  in  the  interest  of 
the  health  of  employes,  it  has  been  achieved 
through  enforcement  of  the  Health,  Safety  and-i 


58         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

t  Comfort  Act,  under  the  new  administration,  and 
x  within  the  past  few  months. 

In  Pittsburgh,  the  Black  City,  a  department 
store  exhibits  marvellous  laces,  and  delicately 
tinted,  perishable  silks.  The  soot  laden  city  air 
is  drawn  down  through  a  high  intake,  and  kept 
physically  pure  by  being  pumped  through  flowing 
water  and  cotton  batting.  In  this  store  are  to  be 
found  the  most  uniformly  courteous,  unwearied, 
refreshed  looking  sales  clerks  in  all  the  city. 
When  I  commented  upon  this  fact  to  the  man- 
ager, he  agreed  that  pure,  fresh  air  undoubtedly 
was  one  contributing  cause  of  this  desirable  con- 
dition. "But,"  he  said,  "it  is  only  honest  to  tell 
you  that  we  did  that  in  the  first  place  for  the  sake 
of  the  laces  and  silks." 

In  a  candy  factory  in  the  same  Black  City  of 
Pittsburgh,  I  found  on  a  horribly  smoky,  muggy 
September  afternoon,  in  1907,  a  workroom  so  cool 
and  refreshing,  in  which  everyone  looked  so  com- 
fortable, that  I  have  always  remembered  it  as  a 
bright  spot  in  a  dismal  experience.  The  work- 
room was  kept  at  a  fixed  temperature  and  the  air 
pure  because  the  girls  were  dipping  chocolates  of 
the  finest  and  most  expensive  quality  which  would 
be  ruined  if  the  heat  and  soot  of  the  city  reached 
them.  For  that  one  room  the  air  was  pumped 
through  cotton  batting  and  cold,  flowing  water 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         59 

and,  by  a  fortunate  accident,  the  temperature  re- 
quired for  the  chocolates  happened  also  to  be 
wholesome  and  agreeable  for  the  workers.  The 
closing  gong  sounded  while  we  lingered  in  the 
room,  and  the  girls  showed  no  zeal  to  rush  for 
their  hats  and  quit  the  place.  I  spoke  of  this  to 
one  of  them,  and  her  quick  reply  was  "Do  you 
think  we're  going  to  be  as  comfortable  as  this 
again  before  we  get  back  here  to-morrow  morn- 
ing?" 

Surely  the  time  cannot  be  far  distant  when  the 
conscience  of  the  community  will  demand  of  the 
chocolate  industry  that  it  shall  do  throughout, 
for  the  health  and  comfort  of  its  workers,  what  it 
now  finds  it  profitable  to  do  in  one  room  in  each 
factory  for  the  sake  of  the  appearance  of  its 
product. 

In  a  southern  city,  in  the  heart  of  a  vast  to- 
bacco growing  region,  I  was  taken  to  see  a  new 
candy  factory  of  which  the  citizens  were  proud. 
It  was  in  a  fine  new  concrete  building,  with  in- 
numerable windows  admitting  light  and  air. 
These  were  open  in  the  mild  southern  climate, 
and  a  swarm  of  bees  had  entered  through  them  in 
search  of  sweets.  A  battle  was  going  on  between 
the  employes  and  the  bees,  and  the  floor  was 
strewn  with  dead  and  wounded  insects.  To  me  as 
representative  of  the  consuming  public,  this  floor 


60         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

was  of  extraordinary  interest.  It  was  of  light- 
colored  concrete,  smooth  and  adapted  to  the  main- 
tenance of  exquisite  cleanliness.  The  manager 
had  provided  numerous  spittoons  for  the  use  of 
the  workmen.  Neither  he  nor  they  seemed,  how- 
ever, to  feel  under  obligation  to  use  them,  and 
the  light-colored,  smooth  concrete  floor  was  dis- 
figured in  many  directions  with  pools  of  tobacco 
juice,  through  which  flies  and  surviving  wounded 
bees  crawled  in  great  numbers,  crawling  after- 
wards over  candy  in  various  stages  of  preparation 
and  packing. 

In  this  new  factory  the  latest  machinery  was 
installed.  Here,  too,  the  chocolate  room  was  kept 
at  a  fixed  temperature.  The  candies  were  of  all 
qualities,  from  fine  bon-bons  to  the  poisonous 
trash  which  mission  Sunday  schools  buy  for  their 
Christmas  trees.  Coal-tar  dyes  of  many  colors 
stood  boldly  open  to  view,  and  our  friendly  host 
offered  us  candies  to  eat,  unconscious  of  the  hor- 
ror inspired  by  his  defiled  floor,  his  spittoons,  and 
his  coal-tar  dyes. 

There  was,  at  that  time,  no  state  factory  law, 
and  no  requirement  that  seats  should  be  provided 
for  women  and  girls  at  work.  A  large  group  of 
young  girls,  apparently  between  14  and  16  years 
of  age  stood,  packing  candy  for  shipment,  at  a 
table  far  too  high  for  them,  which  had  been  origi- 


Modern  Industry  and  Health          61 

nally  adapted  to  a  group  of  men  who  were  now 
working  in  a  different  part  of  the  factory.  To  our 
suggestion  that  the  girls  could  do  more  work  in  a 
day  if  the  table  were  lowered  and  they  were  al- 
lowed to  sit,  the  manager  genially  replied  that 
they  were  paid  by  the  piece  and  worked  as  hard  as 
they  could,  whatever  position  they  were  in.  The 
concrete  floor,  which  so  sadly  failed  of  its  purpose 
in  the  matter  of  cleanliness,  was  terribly  hard 
upon  the  feet  of  all  who  had  to  stand  long  upon 
it.  Needless  standing  is  always  an  indication  of 
incompetent  management.  It  is  less  injurious  to 
boys  than  to  girls  because  of  their  different  struc- 
ture, and  because  they  are  so  inevitably  restless 
that  they  shift  about  and  lessen  the  harm  to  them- 
selves without  knowing  that  they  are  doing  it. 
Their  very  restlessness  often  saves  them  from  be- 
ing asked  to  stand  except  when  actively  engaged 
in  tending  a  machine  which  automatically  keeps 
them  still. 

That  factory  ships  candy  in  quantities  through- 
out the  Southwest,  and  the  people  of  the  city  in 
which  it  stands  buy  its  product  with  pride  and 
pleasure  because  it  is  the  most  modern  of  their 
industries.  The  manager  is  a  much  respected, 
enterprising  citizen,  no  more  aware  of  the  relation 
of  industry  to  health  and  disease  than  the  people 
among  whom  he  moves  socially. 


62         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

How  far  we  are  from  acting  upon  the  idea  that 
work  is  one  foundation  of  health,  how  much 
farther  from  compelling  industry  to  use  its  own 
inherent  resources  for  the  good  health  of  the  work- 
ers, is  illustrated  by  an  episode  of  the  Pittsburgh 
Survey.  During  an  early  conference  of  the  in- 
vestigators, in  September,  1907,  someone  sug- 
gested that  one  of  the  first  inquiries  should  test 
the  truth  of  the  statement  that,  in  the  steel  in- 
dustry, men  were  employed  365  days  in  the  year, 
twelve  hours  a  day;  and  twice  a  month  24  hours 
at  a  stretch,  at  the  turn  of  the  shift  from  night- 
work  to  daywork  on  Sunday.  All  who  were  pres- 
ent agreed,  except  the  questioner,  that  it  seemed 
inconceivable  that  men  could  endure  such  strain, 
especially  in  the  heat  at  which  much  of  the  work 
is  done. 

After  a  fortnight,  however,  Professor  Commons 
reported  that  it  was  true.  Those  were  the  work- 
ing hours,  for  the  water  boys  as  well  as  for  the 
men  whom  they  served,  and  the  consequences  were 
such  as  would  naturally  follow.  Occasionally  a 
man  died  at  his  work.  Sometimes  a  man  collapsed 
on  the  way  home.  Strained  hearts,  paralysis,  and 
disorders  less  obviously  traceable  to  a  particular 
exertion  but  due  to  heat,  fatigue,  and  strain  car- 
ried men  off. 

The  steel  industry  did  not,  at  that  time,  get 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         63 

many  local  recruits  among  Americans,  or  among 
foreigners  who  had  been  here  any  length  of  time. 
Employment  bureaus  were  maintained  to  bring  in 
men  from  Ellis  Island  to  Pittsburgh,  to  work 
under  that  strain. 

When  the  facts  were  ascertained  and  made  pub- 
lic, conditions  began  very  slowly  to  change  in 
some  degree.  Sunday  repair  work  was  reduced 
in  some  places;  shifts  were,  in  some  cases,  changed 
from  two  of  twelve  hours  to  three  of  eight  hours 
each,  though  63  per  cent,  of  employes  in  the  steel 
industry  still  worked  12  hours  in  24  in  the  year 
1913. 

The  stockholders  of  the  industry  have  again 
voted  against  a  general  reduction  of  the  working 
hours  to  eight;  and  the  legislature  of  Pennsyl- 
vania has  again  killed  a  bill  which  would,  if 
enacted,  have  ended  the  employment  at  night  of 
boys  fourteen  and  fifteen  years  old  in  making 
steel. 

Neither  the  federal  government,  the  State  of 
Pennsylvania,  nor  the  City  of  Pittsburgh  has 
records  showing  what  this  overwork  has  been  do- 
ing to  the  health  of  the  workers.  When  men  fell 
ill  of  tuberculosis,  rheumatism,  or  other  slow  dis- 
abling disease,  they  commonly  went  home  to 
Europe  to  die,  so  that  they  did  not  even  appear 


64         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

in  the  mortality  figures  of  the  decennial  federal 
Census. 

The  steel  industry  had  been  encouraged  in  reck- 
lessness by  a  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  of 
Pennsylvania.  If  an  alien  was  killed  in  industry, 
the  surviving  alien  dependents  living  in  Europe 
could  not  through  counsel,  or  through  the  consul 
of  their  own  country,  appear  in  any  court  in  Penn- 
sylvania to  ask  damages  for  the  loss  of  their  bread- 
winner. This  has  recently  been  altered  by  statute, 
so  that  to-day,  if  a  Slav  or  an  Italian  comes  to  this 
country  leaving  his  family  in  Europe  and  is  killed 
while  still  an  alien,  his  family  may  claim  damages. 

Sinister,  indeed,  for  a  series  of  years,  was  the 
influence  of  that  decision  upon  the  health  and 
safety  of  workingmen  in  Pennsylvania.  To  avoid 
the  possible  costs  entailed  by  the  death  of  native 
or  naturalized  men  while  at  work,  employment 
agents  bringing  in  recruits  for  the  dangerous  in- 
dustries were  actively  tempted  by  the  decision  to 
prefer  detached  aliens. 

Our  greatest  manufacturing  industry  was, 
under  that  decision,  moving  in  the  direction  ex- 
actly opposite  to  that  of  Germany  and  the  other 
most  enlightened  industrial  nations.  They  have, 
for  a  quarter  century,  been  striving  to  stimulate 
employers  to  make  industry  safe  by  increasingly 
placing  upon  them  the  cost  of  the  death  or  dis- 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         65 

ability  of  a  wage  earner.  The  employers,  under 
this  compulsion,  form  mutual  insurance  compan- 
ies and  distribute  over  the  whole  industry,  as  they 
see  fit,  the  damage  cost  arising  from  deaths  and 
injuries.  Such  insurance  affords  the  maximum 
financial  stimulus  for  employers  to  make  industry 
safe.  The  Pennsylvania  decision  worked  for 
years  in  exactly  the  opposite  way. 

Among  several  states  which  are  now  legislating 
with  intent  to  make  industry  safe,  perhaps  the 
most  striking  experiment  is  that  of  Washington. 
The  statute  provides  that  if,  in  any  occupation, 
an  employe  loses  his  life  or  becomes  permanently 
disabled,  his  dependents  have  a  valid,  legal  claim 
upon  that  industry — the  wife  throughout  widow- 
hood, the  children  until  the  16th  birthday. 

This  statute  has  been  unanimously  sustained  by 
the  Supreme  Court  of  Washington,  and  is  pending 
before  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States,  in 
a  case  to  test  its  constitutionality.  There  was  in 
the  state  one  extra  hazardous  industry,  the  manu- 
facture of  explosives.  Only  two  establishments 
were  engaged  in  it.  One  blew  up,  killing  eight 
employes.  The  State  of  Washington  paid  the 
damages  due,  under  the  statute,  to  the  survivors 
and  to  the  dependents  of  the  dead,  and  sent  the 
bill  to  the  company  and  its  competitor.  The  com- 
petitor is  testing  the  constitutionality  of  the  law. 


66         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

No  other  state  seems  to  have  gone  quite  so  far 
as  Washington  in  its  effort  to  make  it  worth  while 
for  the  extra  hazardous  industries  to  reduce  their 
hazards.  The  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court  of 
the  United  States  will,  therefore,  be  of  epoch  mak- 
ing importance. 

Between  the  extremes  of  policy  adopted  by 
Washington  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  courts  of 
Pennsylvania  on  the  other  (whose  decisions  have, 
for  years,  deprived  thousands  of  working  people 
of  compensation  for  injuries)  experiments  in  great 
variety  are  in  process,  all  directed  toward  assur- 
ing to  wage  workers  and  their  families  some  com- 
pensation, and  to  employers  new  stimulus  for 
making  industry  safe. 

Any  constitution  can,  with  the  expenditure  of 
time  and  trouble,  be  brought  into  line  with  civi- 
lization.* Laws  must  ultimately  be  enacted  in 
every  state,  assuring  to  the  survivors  of  men 
killed  at  work  some  payment  of  damages,  and  to 
workers  hurt  but  not  killed  some  reasonable  com- 
pensation for  the  loss  of  health,  or  limbs,  or  earn- 
ing power.  In  not  one  state  has  this  yet  been 
done  effectively. 

If  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  fol- 

*This  has  been  conclusively  shown  by  the  action  of  the 
voters  of  New  York  State  during  the  past  three  years  in 
relation  to  workmen's  compensation. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         67 

lows  the  reasoning  of  the  Court  of  Washington, 
the  slow  process  of  changing  constitutions  and 
statutes  of  other  states  will  be  relatively  easy.  If, 
however,  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States 
should  follow  the  reasoning  of  the  New  York 
Court  of  Appeals  in  the  Ives  case,  we  shall  be  con- 
fronted by  the  painful  and  weary  task  of  amend- 
ing the  Constitution  of  the  United  States.  The 
recent  adoption  of  two  amendments,  the  first  in 
nearly  fifty  years,  shows  that  this  process,  though 
slow  and  discouraging,  is  no  longer  impossible. 

Factory  Inspection 

One  serious  weakness  in  our  dealing  with  in- 
dustry in  relation  to  health,  safety  and  comfort 
lies  in  our  disregard  of  the  factory  inspection  staff. 
In  Germany,  where  accidents  and  bad  health 
among  employes  are  causes  of  direct  expense  to 
employers,  the  aid  and  advice  of  inspectors  are 
sought  for  keeping  factories  safe  and  wholesome. 
Inspectors  are  technically  trained  men  and  wom- 
en, carefully  fitted  for  their  work  and  of  great  im- 
portance to  both  employers  and  employes.  Their 
visits  are,  therefore,  welcomed  by  both. 

In  this  country,  on  the  contrary,  inspectors  are 
selected  in  consideration  of  their  usefulness  to  a 
party  organization,  or  a  trade  union,  rather  than 
their  technical  qualifications  for  their  task.  In 


68         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

the  greatest  industrial  state,  New  York,  where  the 
inspection  staff  has  the  nominal  protection  of  the 
civil  service  law,  the  State  Civil  Service  Commis- 
sion has,  for  many  years,  been  as  actively  in  poli- 
tics as  any  avowedly  political  part  of  the  state 
government.  This  is  utterly  demoralizing  to  the 
inspection  staff  and  the  employers,  and  defeats  the 
purpose  for  which  the  inspectors  exist. 

Twenty  years  ago,  I  cherished  hopes  of  im- 
proved provisions  for  the  health  of  factory  work- 
ers to  come  through  the  employment  of  women 
as  inspectors.  Experience  has  shown  that  there 
is  a  large  field  in  which  they  can  be  of  great  ser- 
vice. But  neither  men  nor  women  can  do  what 
needs  to  be  done  until  our  whole  attitude  toward 
the  task  is  fundamentally  changed.  At  present, 
the  employes  are  so  hopeless  of  benefits  to  be  de- 
rived from  the  visits  of  inspectors,  that  they  are 
commonly  either  wholly  indifferent  or,  sometimes, 
willing  cynically  to  join  with  foreman  or  superin- 
tendent in  tricking  an  inspector  and  concealing 
violations  of  the  law. 

A  black  chapter  in  our  industrial  history  is  this 
of  our  treatment  of  our  factory  inspectors.  They 
have  been  left  in  the  position  of  hostile  critics — 
prosecutors — of  corporations  infinitely  more  pow- 
erful than  themselves.  Within  the  factory  they 
have  been  met  as  enemies,  bribed  when  possible 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         69 

and,  in  shamefully  numerous  cases,  removed  from 
office  when  they  could  be  neither  bribed,  tricked 
nor  intimidated. 

Under  these  sorry  conditions  the  scientific  out- 
put of  these  officials  is  naturally  valueless.  In- 
deed, with  the  honorable  exception  of  the  New 
York  State  reports  standardized  a  few  years  ago 
by  Commissioner  Sherman,  the  official  reports  on 
factory  inspection  only  deepen  the  darkness  of  our 
ignorance  of  the  relation  of  the  different  branches 
of  industry  to  the  health  of  the  workers  or  the 
consumers. 

Fatigue  and  Disease 

During  the  past  three-quarters  of  a  century 
there  has  been  a  continuous  movement  for  a 
shorter  working  day.  When,  in  1830,  my  father 
was  a  printer's  apprentice  in  Philadelphia,  he  and 
his  fellow  apprentices  regularly  expected  to  work 
in  summer  "from  light  until  dark,"  i.  e.  from  the 
moment  they  could  see  after  dawn,  until  they 
could  no  longer  see  in  the  late  dusk  of  the  summer 
evening.  In  winter  they  worked  from  6  a.  m.  to 
8  p.  m.  with  an  hour  for  dinner,  and  a  half  hour 
each  for  breakfast  and  supper. 

During  the  three-quarters  of  a  century  since 
those  days,  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men  and 
women  have  engaged  in  strikes  in  the  hope  of  es- 


70         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

tablishing  permanently  a  shorter  working  day. 
In  so  doing,  they  were  performing,  at  a  terrible 
cost  to  themselves,  an  invaluable  service  in  behalf 
of  the  public  health  of  this  nation.  But  this  fact 
was  not  recognized  until  within  recent  years,  and 
then  only  incidentally.  Even  now  it  appears 
probable  that  far  more  would  have  been  gained, 
and  at  infinitely  less  cost  in  suffering,  if  the  energy 
spent  in  strikes  for  shorter  working  hours  had  all 
been  directed  to  enacting  and  enforcing  statutes. 
Since  1895,  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States  has,  at  different  times  and  in  connection 
with  several  cases,  laid  down  the  principle  that 
the  welfare  of  the  community  requires  some  rea- 
sonable restriction  upon  the  working  hours  of 
adult  men  and  women.  The  Court  decided  in 
1898,*  that  the  working  day  might  reasonably  be 
limited  to  eight  hours  for  men  working  under- 
ground in  mines  and  smelters.  This  could  be  done 
because  mining  was  an  intrinsically  dangerous  oc- 
cupation. Later,  the  Court  held  f  that  the  work- 
ing hours  of  bakers  could  not  be  limited  by  statute 
to  ten  in  twenty-four.  For  if  baking  had  been  an 
intrinsically  dangerous  occupation,  the  women 
who  have,  since  the  foundation  of  the  Republic, 
baked  bread  for  their  families,  must  have  suffered 

*  Holden  vs.  Hardy,  169  U.  S.  366. 

t  Lochner  vs.  New  York,  198  U.  S.  45,  1905. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         71 

in  health.  The  Court  was  not  acquainted  with 
the  trade  life  of  bakers.  It  did  not  know  that,  in 
American  cities,  thousands  of  bakers  work  under- 
ground, almost  like  miners. 

In  this  decision  the  Court  laid  down  the  prin- 
ciple that,  where  a  statute  interferes  with  the  free- 
dom of  contract  of  adults,  professedly  in  the  in- 
terest of  the  public  health  and  welfare,  the  fact 
must  be  made  clear  to  the  Court  that  the  public 
health  is  really  concerned. 

In  this  decision  began  the  recent  era  of  sus- 
tained, continuing  effort  for  a  working  day  lim- 
ited by  statute  for  men  and  women  in  manufac- 
ture. Upon  this  decision  rests  the  procedure  of 
the  National  Consumers'  League  whose  Commit- 
tee on  the  Legal  Defence  of  Labor  Laws  has  since 
1907  continuously  prepared  briefs  for  the  use  of 
the  courts  in  cases  involving  working  hours.* 

In  the  preparation  of  these  briefs  the  fact  has 
been  discovered  and  popularized  that,  of  all  the 
industrial  causes  of  disease,  none  is  so  universal 

*  Fatigue  and  Efficiency,  by  Josephine  Goldmark.  The 
Russell  Sage  Foundation,  1912.  This  fundamental  work  deal- 
ing with  the  relation  of  fatigue  to  disease  grew  out  of  a 
brief  prepared  by  Miss  Goldmark  in  defence  of  the  Oregon 
ten  hours'  law  for  women  employed  in  manufacture.  The 
brief  formed  the  basis  of  the  favorable  decision  handed 
down  in  January,  1908,  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States. 


72         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

as  fatigue.  Of  all  the  poisons,  it  is  the  most  uni- 
versally diffused,  controllable  but  not  to-day  con- 
trolled. Sinister  as  many  industrial  poisons  are 
now  known  to  be,  this  one  alone  invests  with  a 
deadly  threat  the  common  run  of  ordinary  occu- 
pations. This  gives  new  significance  to  the  com- 
plaint that  working  people  are  worn  out  prema- 
turely by  simple  tasks,  if  these  tasks  involve  mo- 
notony or  speeding. 

We  know  now  for  the  first  time,  in  a  form  clear 
not  only  to  learned  courts,  but  to  the  simplest 
machine  tenders,  why  these  are  often  old  at  thirty, 
and  superannuated  at  forty  years.  The  omni- 
present poison  of  fatigue  prepares  the  frames  for 
every  germ  that  lurks. 

This  consideration  it  is  which  led  the  Supreme 
Court  of  Mississippi  to  speak  recently  of  the  "in- 
alienable right  to  rest,"  in  a  decision  sustaining  as 
constitutional  a  statute  limiting  to  ten  hours  the 
working  day  of  men  and  women  in  cotton  mills. 

The  whole  procedure  in  defence  of  labor  laws 
has  thus  been  revolutionized.  Instead  of  abstract 
discussions  of  abstract  freedom,  the  procedure  is, 
to-day,  to  ascertain  the  exact  facts,  to  show  what 
the  existing  working  hours  are,  what  other  nations 
and  states  have  done  about  it,  and  what  the  medi- 
cal profession  says  on  the  subject.  The  final  de- 
ciding factor  is. not  "freedom"  but  health. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         73 

The  International  Conference  for  Labor  Legis- 
lation at  Berne,  Switzerland,  in  September,  1913, 
had  for  its  principal  subjects  two  proposals  deal- 
ing with  working  hours.  One  was  the  introduction 
of  the  ten  hours  days  for  women  in  manufacture  in 
all  the  fourteen  nations  of  Europe,  by  a  treaty 
like  that  which  took  effect  on  New  Year's  Day, 
1910,  and  assured  to  all  women  so  employed  a 
period  of  11  hours'  rest  at  night,  of  which  seven 
hours  must  fall  between  10  p.  m.  and  5  a.  m. 

The  second  proposal  was  to  extend  to  boys  be- 
low the  age  of  16  years  the  same  period  of  rest  at 
night  which  has  already  been  established  for 
women. 

The  ambassadors  of  the  fourteen  European  na- 
tions are  to  meet  in  Berne,  Switzerland,  in  1914, 
to  take  action  upon  these  two  proposals. 

We  cannot  participate  in  this  treaty  procedure 
because  each  of  our  states  is  too  sovereign  to  be 
bound  as  to  its  industrial  legislation  by  an  inter- 
national treaty.  Yet  no  state  is  sovereign  enough 
to  bind  itself.  The  action  of  the  European  nations 
in  this  field  is,  nevertheless,  of  immeasurable  im- 
portance to  us.  For  what  seems  to  them  so  ur- 
gently needful  for  the  health  of  the  working  class 
of  all  European  nations,  that  they  deal  with  it  in 
this  elaborate  and  comprehensive  manner,  seems 
in  consequence  to  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 


74         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

United  States  to  be  reasonable  when  the  individ- 
ual American  states  enact  similar  measures.  And 
the  Court  inclines,  therefore,  to  sustain  these 
measures  as  constitutional. 

At  present,  only  six  of  our  states  have  estab- 
lished a  closing  hour  at  night  for  the  work  of 
women:  Massachusetts,  New  York,  Pennsyl- 
vania, Connecticut,  Indiana  and  Nebraska. 
Among  these  six  are,  however,  the  four  in  which 
the  largest  number  of  women  are  employed  in 
manufacture. 

Four  other  states — Arizona,  California,  Colo- 
rado and  Washington — have  established  the  eight 
hours  day  for  women  and  girls,  and  Oregon  has 
now  a  working  day  of  eight  hours  and  twenty  min- 
utes, and  a  working  week  of  50  hours  for  women 
of  all  ages. 

In  February,  1914,  President  Wilson  signed  a 
bill  limiting  to  eight  hours  in  one  day  the  work 
of  women  in  industry  in  the  District  of  Columbia. 
This  applies  to  virtually  all  occupations  except 
domestic  service,  nursing  the  sick,  and  office  work. 
The  bill  was  introduced  at  the  request  of  the  Na- 
tional Consumers'  League  and  is  the  first  eight 
hours  law  for  women  in  the  East. 


Modern  Industry  and  Health         75 

Industry,  Health  and  Vice 

While  we  thus  struggle  by  petty  retail  measures 
against  disease,  industry  produces  it  by  wholesale. 
If  in  reply  to  this  it  is  objected  that  much  illness 
is  due  not  to  work  but  to  personal  vices,  the  use  of 
alcohol  and  others,  the  answer  is  that  these,  too, 
are  cultivated  as  a  part  of  the  field  of  industry. 
The  wholesale  and  retail  organization  of  the  al- 
cohol industry  has  recently  forced  itself  anew  upon 
the  attention  of  the  nation  by  its  successful  re- 
sistance to  the  enfranchisement  of  women  in  Wis- 
consin, Michigan  and  Ohio.  In  all  three  states 
there  was  a  well-organized  and  largely  financed 
campaign  of  producers  and  distributors  of  alco- 
holic beverages  to  defeat  the  suffrage  amend- 
ments. 

The  international  organization  of  the  white 
slave  traffic  is  no  longer  a  subject  of  dispute.  Our 
own  government  and  the  governments  of  Euro- 
pean nations  are  legislating  with  regard  to  it. 

From  these  two  important  disease  producing 
agencies  men  can  free  themselves  by  their  own 
choice.  But  inescapable  accompaniments  of  in- 
dustry, perennially  producing  disease  for  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  wage-earners,  are  fatigue, 
worry  and  an  insufficient  livelihood.  Against 
these  the  individual  is  largely  powerless. 


76         Modern  Industry  and  Health 

In  April,  1913,  the  most  terrible  of  all  the  rela- 
tions of  industry  to  disease  entered  upon  a  unique 
process  of  hopeful  change.  Through  the  efforts 
of  the  voting  women  of  San  Francisco,  incited 
originally  by  an  obscure  woman  worker  in  the 
needle  trades,  Judge  Charles  Weller  was  recalled 
from  the  Bench.  This  judge  had  degraded  his 
high  office  by  systematically  protecting  men  who 
enticed  young  girls  from  honest  work  into  the 
fields  of  dishonor.  He  had  reduced  the  bail  of  a 
man  under  trial  charged  with  being  a  white  slaver. 
He  had  protected  that  incredible  American  in- 
dustry— the  white  slave  traffic. 

The  new  voters  of  San  Francisco  enlisted 
enough  righteous  men  to  form,  with  them,  a  safe- 
guard for  wage-earning  girls  against  the  most  ter- 
rible form  of  exploitation.  In  doing  this  they 
went  straight  to  the  root  of  the  most  threatening 
of  social  diseases,  the  plague  that  lurks  in  unde- 
fended girlhood  under  pressure  of  underpaid  in- 
dustry. This  incident  heralds,  I  believe,  a  signifi- 
cant approaching  change  in  the  relation  of  in- 
dustry to  health. 


Ill 


MODERN   INDUSTRY   IN   RELATION  TO 
EDUCATION 


MODERN  INDUSTRY  AND  EDUCATION 

We  have  no  national  ideal  of  education,  inher- 
ited, traditional,  corresponding  to  our  ideal  of  the 
family.  Even  the  little  red  school  house,  with  the 
three  R's,  meagre  symbol  of  a  scant  ideal,  was 
never  national.  It  was  Northern  and  Western, 
as  the  log  school  house  belonged  to  the  pioneers. 
The  neighborhood  school  house  with  a  seat  for 
every  child,  is,  in  hundreds  of  counties  in  the 
South,  still  a  dream  of  the  future. 

We  are  committed  to  universal,  free,  compul- 
sory education  of  all  citizens  as  the  logical  corol- 
lary of  universal  suffrage.  But  the  Census  of  1910 
reveals  the  fact  that  we  have  more  than  a  million 
and  a  half  native  whites,  ten  years  old  and  older, 
who  are  unable  to  read  and  write,  three  per  cent, 
of  their  number.*  Clearly,  therefore,  we  are  not 
at  present  approaching  even  the  minimum  educa- 
tional achievement  demanded  of  a  democratic  in- 
dustrial Republic  as  the  condition  of  its  con- 
tinued existence. 

*  1,535,530  persons,  10  years  of  age  and  over,  of  whom 
obviously  some  small  per  cent,  must  be  presumed  to  be 
mentally  deficient. 

79 


80      Modern  Industry  and  Education 

Our  ideal  of  education  differs  from  our  ideal  of 
the  family  in  that  it  is  not  inherited,  but  essen- 
tially modern.  It  differs,  also,  in  that  we  are  not 
falling  away  from  it,  as  we  have  fallen  away,  under 
the  pressure  of  modern  industry,  from  our  ideal 
of  the  family,  but  are  approaching  it,  however 
slowly. 

Throughout  this  lecture  I  assume  that  educa- 
tion is  a  lifelong  process  of  fitting  human  beings 
for  life  in  Society,  for  self-support,  for  sharing  in 
the  conduct  of  industry,  for  parenthood,  for  the 
fullest  responsibility  of  citizenship,  for  all  noble 
enjoyment. 

For  education  in  this  modern,  comprehensive 
interpretation,  industry  affords  a  financial  basis 
and  equipment  more  generous  than  the  human 
race  ever  before  possessed.  Lavishly  abundant 
resources  exist  for  placing  instruction  at  the  com- 
mand of  all  men,  women  and  children  in  the  Re- 
public. Never  was  a  nation  so  rich  as  we  are. 

The  universities  number  their  students  by 
thousands,  the  elementary  schools  count  their 
pupils  by  millions.  Yet  we  are  confronted  by 
chronic,  wholesale  poverty,  inextricably  associated 
with  gross  ignorance.  This  holds  true  among  na- 
tive Americans  of  English  stock,  in  the  Southern 
states,  as  it  does  among  immigrants  in  the  North- 
ern industrial  states.  The  question  thus  arises 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       81 

whether  poverty  and  ignorance,  in  combination, 
may  not  be  a  by-product  of  modern  industry. 

When  I  was  in  college,  students  in  this  country 
were  quite  without  knowledge  of  the  essential 
nature  of  modern  industry.  At  Cornell,  where  I 
was  a  student  in  1876,  we  were  taught  no  eco- 
nomics worthy  of  the  name.  At  the  University  of 
Pennsylvania  my  brother  learned  that  the  point 
of  greatest  importance  in  relation  to  industry  was 
to  understand  the  theory  of  a  beneficent  protec- 
tive tariff.  At  Yale  our  contemporaries  were 
taught  by  Professor  Sumner  the  supreme  advan- 
tage of  free  trade.  Later,  however,  Professor  Sum- 
ner was  the  first  to  awaken  in  our  minds  a  glim- 
mering consciousness  of  a  permanent  wage-earn- 
ing class  in  this  country  by  his  little  volume  en- 
titled "What  Social  Classes  Owe  to  Each  Other." 
Even  the  courageous  pioneer  work  of  Professor 
Richard  T.  Ely,  at  Johns  Hopkins,  which  he  has 
since  carried  forward  there  and  at  the  University 
of  Wisconsin,  had  not  then  begun.  The  American 
faculties  of  those  days  cannot  be  justly  blamed 
for  not  giving  us  what  they  did  not  possess.  Few 
American  teachers  of  economics  and  sociology 
then  read  French  and  German.  Fewer  still  had, 
like  Professor  Ely,  studied  in  Europe. 

The  Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology, 
Sheffield,  Cornell  and  Lawrence  were  new,  or  still 


82       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

in  prospect.  Training  men  to  apply  science  in  the 
service  of  industry  was  still  experimental  in  the 
field  of  higher  education,  and  social  science  had 
hardly  crossed  the  Atlantic.  The  American  Social 
Science  Association  was  not  yet  a  dozen  years  old. 

Then  began  that  application  of  science  in  the 
service  of  industry  which  has  increasingly  ab- 
sorbed our  intellectual  ability,  and  largely  de- 
flected it  from  the  task  of  widening  the  boundaries 
of  knowledge. 

The  men  whose  minds  were  trained  (or  left  un- 
trained) by  the  Faculties  of  those  days  are  the 
Bench  and  the  Bar,  the  captains  of  industry,  the 
Senators  and  the  Faculties  of  to-day.  Men  of  my 
generation,  and  older  men,  have  hitherto  decided 
all  things  relating  to  industry  and  to  education, 
and  they  are  not  yet  relinquishing  that  task  to 
their  successors.  Upon  them  rests  the  full  respon- 
sibility for  the  anarchical  form  of  industry  in  the 
United  States  in  contrast  with  the  beginnings  of 
industrial  order  visible  in  some  of  the  European 
countries.  When,  in  1883,  I  was  a  student  of  the 
Faculty  of  Law  in  Zurich,  professors  in  Switzer- 
land and  Germany  were  already  lecturing  on  new 
aspects  of  industry  in  courses  leading  to  the  de- 
gree of  Doctor  of  Laws.  In  the  University  of 
Berlin  the  same  thing  was  happening.  Avowedly 
impelled  by  the  hope  of  checking  the  revolution- 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       83 

ary  political  activity  of  a  rapidly  growing  party 
of  wage-earners,  Prince  Bismarck  was  calling  upon 
the  universities  to  apply  to  industrial  problems 
the  collective  wisdom  of  the  leaders  of  German 
economic  thought;  and  under  his  leadership  the 
foundations  were  laid  for  that  nationwide,  in- 
clusive, industrial  insurance  which  the  world  is 
now  slowly  copying. 

In  my  student  days  we  heard  much,  not  only  at 
Cornell,  but  in  the  world  at  large,  of  the  Conflict 
of  Science  and  Religion.  The  President  of  Cornell 
published  volumes  on  this  general  theme.  But 
industry,  and  the  laws  and  courts  which  bul- 
warked it,  were  sacrosanct.  They  were  the  Tem- 
ple and  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant,  and  critical 
study  of  them  would  have  been  blasphemy  if  any- 
one had  thought  of  attempting  it. 

There  could  not  have  been  a  graver  misfortune 
for  a  great  nation  in  the  stage  of  industrial  devel- 
opment in  which  we  then  were,  than  such  incom- 
petence in  relation  to  industry  as  disgraced  our 
American  colleges  and  universities.  The  wage- 
earners  have  ever  since  been  tragically  paying  the 
penalty  of  that  default  of  the  higher  education, 
and  they  must  continue  to  pay  until  the  men  of 
my  generation  now  in  control  of  industry,  and  of 
interpreting  and  enforcing  the  law  in  relation  to 
it,  shall  give  way  to  the  new  generation.  Criti- 


84       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

cism,  however  constructive  and  suggestive,  cannot 
help  people  who  are  fifty  years  old  and  older  to 
acquire  social  and  industrial  vision.  The  time  for 
that  vision  is  youth.  Only  the  new  generation 
can  retrieve  our  sins  of  omission  and  commission, 
and  this  they  are  preparing  to  do. 

Within  the  academic  halls  the  change  amounts 
to  a  revolution.  Classes  in  economics  and  sociol- 
ogy now  vie  in  numbers  and  popularity  with 
classes  in  literature.  In  their  brief,  sacrificial  ca- 
reers Elizabeth  Butler,  of  Columbia,  and  Carola 
Woerishoffer,  of  Bryn  Mawr,  heralded  the  new  day 
that  has  come,  the  new  challenge  that  science  of- 
fers to  industry.  This  old  world  can  never  again 
be  quite  so  sodden  when  thousands  of  young  men 
and  women  are  sent  forth  every  year  trained  to 
face  the  world  and  to  strive  all  their  lives  to  see 
it  exactly  as  it  is. 

To  these  successors  we  must  look  for  a  revolu- 
tion in  education  in  relation  to  industry.  To 
them  it  will  not  present  itself  as  a  revolution,  but 
as  a  natural  next  step,  when  they  bring  into  the 
foreground  of  education  the  teaching  of  hygiene 
as  applied  to  every  relation  of  life.  For  men  and 
women  accustomed  throughout  the  high  schools, 
colleges  and  universities  to  athletics,  to  the  out- 
door life,  to  physical  efficiency,  it  must  seem  in- 
sanely perverse  that  we  reserve  outdoor  classes  for 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       85 

the  children  of  less  and  least  vitality.  For  the 
new  generation  of  educational  leaders  health  will 
inevitably  be  the  first  consideration,  in  school  and 
in  industry.  To  the  new  generation  we  must  look, 
therefore,  for  the  new  science  that  we  lack — indus- 
trial hygiene — and  the  new  pedagogy  that  will 
send  forth  young  workers  into  industry  aware  of 
the  provisions  which  the  state  enacts  for  their 
protection,  and  alert  to  avail  themselves  of  the 
benefits  thereof. 

One  glaring  fact  confronts  the  graduates  of  to- 
day, namely,  the  dominant  influence  of  industry 
in  determining  the  ideals  and  the  administrative 
policy  of  our  privately  endowed  universities,  col- 
leges and  schools,  and  in  modifying  the  state  uni- 
versities and  the  public  schools.  When  the  gradu- 
ates leave  the  universities  it  is  to  enter  a  world  in 
which  industry  calls  a  million  children  a  year  too 
early  away  from  the  elementary  classrooms  ir*o 
its  service.  It  thus  creates  as  its  permanent  by- 
product within  the  voting  citizenship  illiteracy 
and  stupidity,  and  broken  health  bred  of  monoto- 
nous labor. 

Enlightening  the  Consumers 

Wholly  new  within  the  educational  institutions 
and  in  the  world  at  large  is  the  attempt  to  educate 
the  consumers  to  know  and  use  their  power  in 


86       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

relation  to  industry.    To-day,  more  than  ever  be- 
fore, the  enlightened  consumer  can  truthfully  say: 

"When  I  depart  this  life,  I  shall  have  prac- 
tised certain  negative  virtues.  I  shall  have  done 
nothing  to  maintain  or  encourage  certain 
evil  industries.  No  young  girl  will  have  been 
withdrawn  from  any  class  in  domestic  science 
to  prepare  for  my  use  any  cigars,  cigarettes, 
chewing  gum  or  tobacco,  or  rouge,  or  hair- 
dye,  or  imitation  jewelry.  No  birds  will  have 
been  killed  to  decorate  my  hats,  no  children 
kept  at  home  from  kindergarten  or  primary 
school,  or  robbed  of  their  hours,  of  play  to 
'willow'  plumes  for  my  headgear.  In  these 
modest  abstinences  I  have  striven  to  keep  my 
individual  conscience  clear  in  relation  to  in- 
dustry because  I,  personally,  received  some 
education  as  to  the  powers  of  consumers." 

Every  generous  young  mind  can  be  kindled  to  a 
passionate  interest  in  the  relation  of  working  chil- 
dren to  itself  and  its  material  possessions.  And 
this  youthful  interest  may  determine  the  later 
activities  of  a  lifetime,  as  Lord  Shaftesbury  re- 
lated that,  when  he  was  a  lad  of  fourteen  years, 
the  sight  of  a  pauper  workingman's  funeral  modi- 
fied the  whole  subsequent  course  of  his  life. 

How  few,  however,  compared  with  the  whole 
mass,  are  the  enlightened  consumers!  How  diffi- 
cult is  their  path,  and  how  incomplete  their  pres- 
ent achievement!  Why,  indeed,  is  education  of 


Modern  Industry  and  Education      87 

consumers  left  to  a  volunteer  body,  such  as  the 
Consumers'  League? 

What  help  do  the  rank  and  file  of  students  in 
colleges  and  normal  schools  get  from  their  Fac- 
ulties in  acquiring  this  elementary  social  instruc- 
tion? Why  do  not  all  the  colleges  inculcate  a 
scientific  attitude  of  mind  with  regard  to  industry, 
awakening  the  spirit  of  inquiry,  and  teaching  the 
available  methods  of  applying  this  spirit?  The 
colleges  have  long  prepared  students  for  the  ser- 
vice of  industry.  When  will  they  give  a  like  share 
of  attention  to  the  mastery  thereof? 

A  while  ago  I  spoke  to  the  students  in  a  South- 
ern girls'  college.  They  were  so  young — 13  to  19 
years  or  thereabouts — that  I  asked  a  member  of 
their  Faculty  to  tell  me  some  of  their  interests,  so 
that  I  might  connect  my  suggestions  with  those 
interests,  as  we  do  with  children.  She  replied, 
"They  don't  know  anything  about  anything.  They 
would  gladly  take  an  interest,  but  the  President 
and  their  mothers  don't  think  they  ought  to  know 
much  about  life."  Yet  many  avenues  of  approach 
offered  access  to  those  young  minds.  They  were 
alive  to  the  usefulness  of  placing  early  their 
Christmas  orders  for  candy  and  chocolates.  They 
responded  to  an  appeal  in  behalf  of  overworked 
young  girls  in  paper-box  factories  who  prepare, 
at  the  last  moment,  boxes  for  Christmas  choco- 


88       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

lates  and  candies,  under  pressure  of  "rush  orders" 
of  belated  shoppers.  They  saw  that  daguerreo- 
types are  no  longer  made  because  we  all  prefer 
photographs,  and  horsehair  sofas  are  extinct  be- 
cause no  one  would  give  them  houseroom.  And 
they  followed  the  analogy  that  goods  may  be 
coveted  because  their  history  has  been  righteous 
throughout  the  processes  of  production  and  dis- 
tribution. They  grasped  the  suggestion  that 
everything  made  to-day  is  made  to  be  sold,  that 
the  purchaser  is  the  true  Lord  of  Industry,  and 
that  we,  all  of  us,  are  purchasers.  They  agreed 
that  there  is  no  longer  any  innocent  bystander. 

Even  more  necessary  is  such  enlightenment  in 
high  schools  and  elementary  schools.  In  certain 
practical  ways  it  can  be  begun  very  early.  Thus 
the  Paulist  Fathers  in  New  York  City  have,  for 
years,  through  their  Sunday  School,  appealed  to 
children,  even  little  ones,  and  their  mothers,  to 
be  considerate  about  Christmas  shopping.  And 
nuns  of  teaching  orders,  during  one  of  their  sum- 
mer schools  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  listened  re- 
ceptively to  an  officer  of  the  Consumers'  League 
explaining  to  them  the  possibility  of  similar  sug- 
gestions to  their  pupils. 

The  children  in  grammar  grades,  and  still  more 
those  in  high  schools,  are  keenly  alert  to  sugges- 
tions of  the  power  we  all  potentially  possess  as 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       89 

consumers.  Their  interest  in  regard  to  things  that 
they  buy  is  of  the  liveliest.  They  are  in  nowise 
blase.  Beginning  with  their  hair  ribbons,  tracing 
them  back  to  the  silk  mills  in  New  Jersey  and 
Pennsylvania,  school  girls  care  eagerly  to  know 
why,  in  silk  ribbon  mills,  wages  are  low,  and  work- 
rooms hot  and  stuffy,  and  how  it  comes  that  quick, 
capable  girls,  hardly  older  than  themselves,  must 
serve  as  pacemakers  for  slower  and  less  gifted 
workers. 

Any  restless  school  boy,  at  the  hobbledehoy  age, 
will  listen  to  the  story  of  the  "grinders'  phthisis" 
that  cuts  down  in  their  prime  men  who  prepare 
blades  for  pocket-knives;  to  a  description  of  need- 
less danger  to  other  boys  arising  from  unguarded 
machines  in  pencil  factories,  and  of  the  small  pay 
that  goes  with  putting  rubbers  in  pencils.  Tales 
of  mine  and  breaker  boys  and  young  lads  working 
at  night  in  glass  works  in  West  Virginia  find  a 
responsive  chord  in  the  breasts  of  school  boys, 
who  readily  see  that  none  of  us  escape  using  coal 
and  glass.  They,  too,  perceive  that  there  are,  in 
this  case,  no  innocent  bystanders,  that  we  are  all 
tarred  with  the  same  stick. 

Working-class  children  during  their  few  brief 
years  in  the  elementary  schools  need  the  appeal 
to  sympathetic  imagination  the  more  because  of 
the  dulling  experience  that  befalls  them  in  the 


90       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

.  long  years  of  work  that  follow.  Their  direst  need 
is  for  cultivation  of  their  critical  sense  in  relation 
to  industry. 

Refreshing  is  the  alert  response  of  young  minds 
stirred  by  the  idea  of  their  relation,  previously  an 
unconscious  one,  as  indirect  employers.  Curi- 
ously varied  is  the  expression  of  the  faces  of  a 
high  school  class  when  asked  how  they  account 
for  the  fact,  by  no  means  inevitable,  that  other 
children  of  their  own  age  are  less  educated  than 
themselves?  They  are  visibly  shocked  by  a  blunt 
statement  that  the  present  difference  in  oppor- 
tunity is  due  not  to  their  own  superior  gifts,  or 
to  the  superior  thrift  or  generosity,  necessarily,  of 
their  parents,  but  to  the  defective  organization  of 
education  and  of  industry.  To  most  young  minds 
the  idea  is  fascinatingly  new  that  the  transforma- 
tion of  industry  is  to-day  the  life  and  death  ques- 
tion of  this  Republic. 

This  new  education  of  youth  the  Nation  sorely 
needs.  We  must  establish  in  all  the  oncoming 
generation  an  unwearying  spirit  of  inquiry  with 
regard  to  industry.  Nothing  can  safely  be  as- 
sumed in  relation  to  it.  Is  it  paying  its  social 
costs?  Is  its  product,  indeed,  value  received? 
Does  it  bring  forth  beauty?  Or  does  it  give  us 
personal  adornment  at  cost  of  smoke-laden,  filthy 
sky  and  air? 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       91 

Child  Labor 

Far,  however,  from  educating  the  children  of 
wage-earners  to  intelligent  criticism  as  consumers, 
the  schools  surrender  them  too  early  to  the  ser- 
vice of  industry,  and  tend  increasingly  to  rob  the 
few  years  now  sacred  to  childhood  by  making  the 
schools'  work  vocational  and  industrial*/ The  new 
vocational  effort  largely  addresses  itself  to  fitting 
American  youth  to  escape  from  machine  tending 
to  become  foremen,  managers,  superintendents. 
But  in  the  nature  of  industry  the  opportunities 
for  such  work  are  a  trivial  fraction  of  the  whole. 
Vast  multitudes  must  be  machine  tenders,  and 
machines  increase  daily,  and  under  the  present 
conditions  machines  destroy  mind. 

For  more  than  a  century  philanthropists  have 
struggled  in  England  and,  more  recently,  in  this 
country,  to  safeguard  children  of  wage  earners 
from  destruction  by  industry.  The  National  Child 
Labor  Committee,  the  National  Consumers' 
League,  the  National  Education  Association,  and 
other  national  bodies  galore  have  for  years  worked 
to  assure  educational  opportunity  to  all  the  chil- 
dren. They  strive  to  establish  minimum  standards 
below  which  the  school  year  may  not  be  shortened, 
children  may  not  leave  school  unable  to  read  and 


92      Modern  Industry  and  Education 

write,  and  industrial  employment  may  be  for- 
bidden. 

Always  and  everywhere  they  find  the  same 
forces  opposing  them.  Rural  industries  claim 
children  for  the  beet  fields,  the  cotton  and  to- 
bacco fields,  the  bean  and  pea  fields,  the  berry 
patches,  the  cranberry  bogs,  the  canneries,  and 
the  orchards.  Coal  mines  consume  boys  in  break- 
ers and  underground.  Urban  industries,  too,  cot- 
ton and  woollen  and  silk  mills,  glass  works,  sweat- 
shops, the  messenger  service,  and  the  newspapers, 
all  industries — the  world  over — in  which  children 
can  be  employed,  are  forever  calling  them  from 
school  to  work. 

Only  the  men  and  women  who  are  engaged  in 
the  struggle  year  after  year  know  how  powerful 
and  how  active  are  the  interests  that  profit  by  the 
labor  of  children.  In  four  Southern  states — the 
Carolinas,  Georgia  and  Alabama — the  cotton 
mill  interest  has  hitherto  succeeded  in  pre- 
venting the  adoption  of  the  fourteenth  birthday 
as  the  lowest  limit  for  children  beginning  to  work. 
In  West  Virginia  the  glass  companies  and  the  mine 
owners  killed  all  child  labor  legislation  at  the  ses- 
sion of  1913.  In  Pennsylvania  in  the  same  year 
the  glass  companies  and  the  textile  manufacturers 
successfully  made  common  cause  against  the 
working  children,  killed  the  child  labor  bill,  and 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       93 

kept  in  force  the  old  law.  Under  it  boys  of  four- 
teen years  may  still  be  legally  required  to  work 
eight  hours  at  night  in  glassworks  and  all  other 
industries  having  continuing  processes. 

Children  have  a  statutory  limit  of  their  work- 
ing day  to  eight  hours  in  twenty-four  in  only  one 
Southern  state,  Mississippi,  and  in  only  one  New 
England  state,  Massachusetts.  Forty  states  now 
forbid  employment  of  children  before  the  four- 
teenth birthday.  Only  the  Southern  cotton  manu- 
facturing states  show  no  disposition  thus  to  pro- 
tect their  young  boys  and  girls  and  give  them 
time  for  a  rudimentary  education.  Of  children 
who  work  on  these  terms,  what  cant  it  is  to  say 
that  they  have  "a  square  deal,"  or  "an  equal  op- 
portunity" with  children  of  the  socialized  North- 
western states,  with  their  long  childhood  safe- 
guarded from  wage-earning,  with  abundant 
schools,  and  free  university  tuition  to  tempt  them 
to  continue  the  process  of  education! 

For  the  unfortunate  children,  twelve  and  thir- 
teen years  old,  of  the  belated  Southern  cotton 
manufacturing  states,  the  federal  bill  pending  be- 
fore Congress  seems  to  offer  new  hope.  It  rein- 
troduces  the  idea  of  federal  action  in  defence  of 
boys  and  girls  now  legally  employed  below  the  age 
of  fourteen  years  in  mills  and  mines.  It  proposes 
to  exclude  from  interstate  commerce  all  goods 


94       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

derived  from  mills  or  mines  in  which  children  be- 
low the  age  of  fourteen  years  are  employed. 

The  federal  bill  thus  brings  into  sharp  relief 
the  fact  that  native  white  orphans,  of  native  par- 
entage, in  Georgia  are  future  citizens  of  this  Re- 
public as  surely  as  the  happier  immigrant  chil- 
dren of  New  York,  or  the  native  children  of  the 
enlightened  and  humane  Northwestern  states.  As 
future  citizens,  the  children  of  the  South  need 
fourteen  years,  at  least,  of  childhood  in  which  to 
grow  and  learn.  And  the  bill  appeals  to  the  whole 
nation  to  see  that  this  claim  is  enforced,  this  right 
is  guaranteed  to  them. 

The  Working  Class  Children 

Modern  industry  tends  to  keep  the  wage-earn- 
ers spiritually  poor  and  dull.  Of  all  the  charges 
made  against  it  to-day  this  is  the  gravest.  The 
ultimate  blasphemy  is  the  proposal  to  fit  children 
for  industry  as  industry  is.  It  must  be  revolu- 
tionized before  it  will  be  fit  for  children  and  youth 
to  enter.  It  must  first  be  made  democratic  and 
cooperative,  transformed  into  service. 

The  need  of  to-day  is  for  education  to  enable 
children  and  youth,  and  men  and  women,  to  re- 
sist the  ruinous,  stupefying  influence  of  industry. 
To  make  this  resistance  successful,  the  schools 
must  keep  the  whole  body  of  young  workers  on 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       95 

their  rolls  at  least  for  regular  part  time  attend- 
ance, until  the  twenty-first  birthday,  until  the  edu- 
cation for  citizenship  ends,  and  education  by  and 
through  the  duties  of  citizenship  begins. 

One  short  step  in  this  direction  has  been  taken 
in  Wisconsin  and  in  Ohio,  where  the  working 
week  of  children  below  the  16th  birthday  is  re- 
duced to  48  hours,  of  which  five  must  be  spent  in 
continuous  classes.  Enlightened  teachers  of  these 
classes  strive  to  rekindle  in  working  boys  and  girls, 
from  week  to  week,  the  intellectual  life  which  in- 
dustry tends  to  extinguish  by  dulling  monotonous 
work.  This  is  one  line  of  hopeful  effort  in  a  direc- 
tion immeasurably  important,  for  in  a  Republic 
on  pain  of  utter  failure  the  common  laborers  must 
be  educated  citizens.  Massachusetts  has  for  many 
years  recognized  this,  at  least  in  a  modest  degree, 
in  the  statute  which  holds  the  employer  responsi- 
ble for  regular  school  attendance  of  all  illiterate 
minor  employes. 

In  speaking  to  teachers  about  vocational  train- 
ing, my  one  appeal  to  them  is  to  fit  every  child  to 
resist  the  pressure  of  industry,  to  inculcate  in  all 
children  the  ambition  to  become  cooperative  citi- 
zens, keeping  themselves  in  health,  practising  the 
art  of  thinking.  Above  all  else  is  the  need  to  cher- 
ish their  critical  faculty,  to  train  them  to  resist 
monotony,  and  to  organize  their  own  activities 


96      Modern  Industry  and  Education 

for  themselves,  so  that  they  may  combat  suc- 
cessfully the  deadliest  foe  of  this  Republic,  the 
lowering  of  the  citizenship  by  industry.  How  else 
can  the  wage  workers  regain  their  lost  share  of 
control  and  develop  anew  the  sense  of  civic  and  in- 
dustrial responsibility? 

Far  from  equipping  children  to  maintain  them- 
selves against  its  injurious  tendencies,  our  ele- 
mentary schools  tend  rather  to  serve  as  feeders 
for  industry.  Domestic  science  begins  commonly 
in  the  sixth  or  seventh  grade,  if  at  all,  while 
daughters  of  working  families  leave  by  thousands 
from  the  fifth  to  enter  upon  industrial  life.  When 
a  little  immigrant  girl  fresh  from  the  steerage  en- 
ters school  in  the  foreign  colony  of  a  manufactur- 
ing city,  she  makes  on  the  first  day  the  acquaint- 
ance of  Teacher,  who  is  thenceforth  her  ideal  lady. 
Teacher  is  usually  young,  friendly,  dressed  in 
shirtwaist,  necktie,  trig  skirt,  belt,  and  shoes  with 
heels.  She  catches  the  little  girl's  imagination, 
and  a  process  of  imitation  begins  which  lasts  at 
least  until  the  child's  14th  birthday.  But  through- 
out all  that  time,  never  once  does  Teacher  do  any- 
thing which  Mother  is  seen  to  do  at  home.  If  the 
windows  are  ever  washed,  it  is  by  the  janitor  or 
his  assistant,  and  usually  out  of  school  hours.  If 
the  floor  is  scrubbed,  the  process  is  unseen.  Wash- 
ing day  is  unknown  within  the  classroom,  and 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       97 

babies  are  alien  to  the  activities  of  Teacher.  Not 
so  much  as  a  cup  of  cocoa  or  a  slice  of  toast  is 
she  seen  to  prepare  by  any  girl  who  leaves  from 
the  "working  paper  grades." 

By  their  one-sided  curriculum,  the  schools  may 
truthfully  be  said  actively  to  divert  the  little 
daughters  of  wage-earning  families  from  home  life 
to  becoming  cash  girls  and  factory  hands.  For  the 
schools  teach  exactly  those  things  which  prepare 
girls  to  become  at  the  earliest  moment  cash  chil- 
dren and  machine  tenders:  punctuality,  regular- 
ity, attention,  obedience,  and  a  little  reading  and 
writing — excellent  things  in  themselves,  but 
wretched  preparation  either  for  domestic  service 
as  an  alternative  choice  of  occupations,  or  for 
homemaking  a  decade  later  on  in  the  lives  of  the 
pupils. 

With  our  material  supplies  in  lavish  abundance 
for  the  full  and  generous  education  of  every  man, 
woman  and  child  throughout  this  whole  country, 
our  trouble  is  our  own  lack  of  vision,  in  city,  state 
and  nation. 

Teaching  is  already  a  public  service,  although 
the  ethics  of  Boards  of  Education  are  still  largely 
commercial,  because  these  Boards  are  chiefly  com- 
posed of  business  men,  with  an  occasional  physi- 
cian whose  ideals  vary  but  slightly  from  theirs. 
The  teaching  staff  itself,  being  in  contact  with 


98       Modern  Industry  and  Education 

the  children,  is  increasingly  socially  minded.  But 
the  teaching  staff,  also,  is  vitiated  by  sordid  ideals 
derived  from  its  competitive  environment.  It, 
too,  suffers  the  taint  of  modern  industry. 

Where  the  National  Child  Labor  Committee, 
when  it  entered  the  field  ten  years  ago,  reasona- 
bly expected  to  find  its  strongest  allies,  among 
principals  and  teachers,  it  has  found,  in  a  disap- 
pointing number  of  individual  cases,  an  unthink- 
ing willingness  to  surrender  children — under  pre- 
text of  their  poverty — to  the  greedy  hunger  of 
mills,  mines,  sweatshops,  cotton  fields,  and  the 
city  street  trades.  Many  children  leave  school  by 
reason  of  the  perverse  suggestions  of  their  teach- 
ers. 

Not  from  the  teaching  staff  has  come  the  in- 
sistent demand  for  scholarships  to  keep  all  the 
children  in  school  at  least  to  the  16th  birthday. 

Surely  our  grandchildren  will  look  back  with 
wonder  that  we,  who  waste  money  hi  war  and 
preparations  for  war,  leave  80,000  children  perma- 
nently in  half-time  classes  for  want  of  school  room 
in  the  greatest  industrial  city  in  this  hemisphere, 
and  issue  in  New  York  City  in  one  year  42,000 
working  papers  to  children  below  the  age  of  16 
years.  The  records  of  illiterate  children  ten  to 
fourteen  years  old  form  a  part  of  every  decennial 
federal  Census,  chiefly  of  native  children  of  native 


Modern  Industry  and  Education       99 

parents,  in  the  Southern  states.  We  let  boys  and 
girls  go  into  monotonous  occupations  at  fourteen 
years  old  or  earlier,  before  their  judgment  has  had 
time  to  develop.  Yet  industry  holds  out  to  the 
rank  and  file  of  those  who  leave  from  the  fifth 
and  sixth  grades — the  educational  steerage — little 
hope  of  orderly  promotion  such  as  they  have  ex- 
perienced in  school,  and  slight  promise  of  later 
variety  of  employment,  or  material  increase  in 
wages. 

All  this  with  no  resounding  protest  from  the 
teaching  staff!  Small  wonder  that  the  children 
lack  the  instruction  adapted  to  prepare  them  for 
the  change  from  our  industrial  chaos  to  the  or- 
derly industrial  service  of  the  future! 

Unacquainted  with  industry  and  out  of  touch 
with  it,  untrained  in  the  principles  and  practice 
of  cooperation,  disfranchised  and  thus  deprived  of 
the  education  derived  from  active  citizenship,  the 
teachers  of  our  schools  are,  in  most  of  the  states, 
failing  the  children  to-day,  as  the  universities  and 
colleges  failed  their  students  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century.  They  are  not  educating  the  masses  of 
children  to  be  masters  of  industry.  On  the  con- 
trary, they  are  participating — at  least  to  the  ex- 
tent of  passive  acquiescence — in  the  evil  process  of 
making  them  slaves  of  machines. 

What  sixth  grade  class  in  this  whole  nation 


100    Modern  Industry  and  Education 

sends  out  its  pupils  fortified  with  full  knowledge 
of  the  meagre  laws  framed  for  their  protection? 
What  children  are  taught  in  school  that  they  can- 
not before  the  16th  birthday  legally  work  in  New 
York  after  five  o'clock  in  a  factory,  and  after  seven 
in  a  store?  How  many  know  that  they  are  enti- 
tled to  seats  with  backs  and  to  the  use  thereof 
whenever  the  nature  of  their  work  permits  such 
use?  Is  there  anything  that  they  more  urgently 
need  to  know  than  these  eminently  practical 
items?  But  how  many  teachers  know  even  these 
few  things  about  industry  as  it  is  to-day?  And 
how  can  they  teach  what  they  do  not  know? 

How  many  normal  schools  require  their  gradu- 
ating classes  to  pass  an  examination  in  the  pro- 
visions of  the  compulsory  education  law,  and  the 
labor  law  applying  to  children  and  adolescents? 
But  without  this  knowledge,  how  can  the  gradu- 
ates, when  they  find  positions,  be  sure  of  obeying 
the  statutes  themselves?  And  how  can  they  in- 
struct their  "working  paper  classes"  and  other 
appropriate  grades  as  to  the  protection  which  the 
law  provides  and  the  children  are  entitled  to  claim 
in  factories,  stores  and  workshops? 

Machine  Tenders 

Modern  industry  calls  increasingly  for  common 
labor  not  only  to  dig  with  pick  and  shovel,  but  to 


Modern  Industry  and  Bu-aVion     ID! 

do  a  thousand  simplified  thmg3  for  which:  jjfetffifj 
hands,  fourteen  to  sixteen  years  old,  being  obtain- 
able for  low  wages,  are  commercially  preferred  to 
the  hands  of  older  persons.  Requiring  attention, 
speed  and  some  slight  dexterity  but  no  other  qual- 
ity, such  work  deadens  young  minds.  Machine 
tending  habituates  them  to  irresponsibility  and 
monotony,  to  the  utter  absence  of  thought,  of  in- 
ventiveness, of  judgment,  of  ambition.  Men  and 
women  who  have  spent  these  plastic  years  in  this 
way  are  worse  human  beings,  not  better  ones,  for 
their  contact  with  industry. 

Obviously  machine  tending  fits  no  girl  for 
bringing  up  children  in  a  home  of  her  own  later 
on,  or  for  taking  any  part  whatever  in  domestic 
life.  The  special  skill  that  she  needs  as  future 
wife  and  mother  is  skill  in  the  art  of  living.  Pro- 
longed machine  tending  prepares  no  boy  for  pro- 
motion to  the  post  of  foreman  or  superintendent. 
On  the  contrary,  the  longer  a  boy  tends  a  machine, 
the  less  is  he  likely  to  develop  qualities  fitting 
him  for  managing  men  or  affairs.  In  the  words 
of  Joseph  Lee,  of  Boston,  president  of  the  Na- 
tional Playgrounds  Association  of  America,  such 
employment  dzseducates  growing  minds. 

Work  must  be  done,  however.  Obviously,  it 
must  not  be  done  by  young  children,  or  in  large 
measure  by  adolescents.  Who  shall  do  it  in  order 


•102    Modern  Industry  and  Education 


at.  the  .least  injury  .may  be  wrought?  What  does 
machine  tending  do  to  older  minds?  Many  years 
ago  when  I  was  chief  factory  inspector  of  the  State 
of  Illinois,  I  found,  in  a  tin  can  factory,  a  shelf 
filled  with  young  boys  whose  duty  was  to  watch 
unceasingly  a  never-ending  procession  of  lids  of 
tomato  cans,  milk  cans,  soup  cans,  cans  for  all  sorts 
of  goods,  as  these  lids  came  down  a  slit  in  an  in- 
cline from  the  upper  to  the  lower  floor.  When  a 
can  lid  was  defective,  a  boy  picked  it  out.  Small 
fingers  were  cut  and  tied  up  in  rags.  Young  legs 
and  backs  were  made  crooked,  young  eyes  were 
strained  by  continuous  watching.  The  work  was 
legal,  once  the  boys  were  14  years  old  and  had 
filed  employment  certificates  at  the  factory  office  ; 
but  young  minds  and  bodies  were  cramped,  stupe- 
fied and  deadened  in  that  work.  I  asked  Mr. 
Henry  Demarest  Lloyd  to  go  with  me  to  see  those 
boys,  hoping  that  he  might  make  them  the  text  of 
some  noble  chapter,  perhaps  in  his  volume  on  the 
Lords  of  Industry. 

On  the  way  to  them  he  saw  a  man,  white-haired 
like  himself,  watching  an  endless  procession  of 
cans  to  which  the  lids  would  later  be  attached. 
This  work  called  for  no  quality  of  mind,  but  sus- 
tained attention  to  a  horrible  monotony.  The 
man  watched  perpetually  for  dents  in  tin  cans, 
and  when  a  can  was  dented,  he  removed  it,  using 


Modern  Industry  and  Education     103 

one  hand  at  long  intervals.  He  needed  good  sight 
in  order  never  to  miss  a  dent.  Thirteen  years  he 
had  sat  there,  day  after  day,  looking  at  cans.  Mil- 
lions of  them  had  passed  before  his  eyes  and  gone 
their  ways  to  the  dump  after  their  brief  service 
was  rendered.  His  industrial  usefulness  was  re- 
duced to  the  use  of  his  eyes  exclusively.  If  they 
should  lose  their  keenness,  he  would  be  a  pauper. 
For  discovering  dents  in  cans  is  not  work  that  so- 
ciety recompenses  with  a  margin  for  savings. 

To  Mr.  Lloyd,  then  at  the  height  of  his  powers, 
those  lost  thirteen  years  were  a  tragedy.  He  was 
fascinated,  horrified  at  the  sight  of  the  slave  of  the 
machine.  The  man  was  a  native  American,  edu- 
cated to  read  and  write,  but  at  the  end  of  ten 
hours'  work  his  eyes  were  too  weary  for  reading. 
All  his  powers  were  absorbed  by  seeking  dents  in 
cans;  whatever  intelligence  he  exercised,  he  had 
to  summon  after  exhausting  the  day's  normal  sup- 
ply of  power  of  attention. 

That  can-watcher  is  a  type  of  millions  of  men 
who,  in  an  infinite  variety  of  ways,  are  reduced  to 
some  one  form  of  attention.  Often  that  is  the 
sole  demand  upon  one,  his  other  powers  atrophy 
by  disuse.  But  the  permanent  tendency  of  indus- 
try is  to  install  more  automatic  machines,  to  re- 
quire more  tenders,  perhaps  one  for  one  machine, 
perhaps  one  for  six,  or  eight,  or  twenty.  And 


104     Modern  Industry  and  Education 

their  inevitable  tendency  is  to  make  the  machine 
tender  automatic  like  themselves.  All  intelligence 
for  the  performance  of  a  voter's  duty  the  machine 
tender  must  get  and  keep  in  spite  of  his  work. 

For  this  more,  perhaps,  than  for  any  other  rea- 
son, the  working  day  in  industry  must  be  short- 
ened for  men  as  well  as  for  women  and  youth,  to 
save  human  faculties  from  being  utterly  dead- 
ened in  the  modern  process  of  production,  and  to 
afford  leisure  for  the  valuable  active  uses  of  the 
mind.  The  unskilled  laborer's  working  day  must 
be  shortened,  his  wage  assured,  the  tasks  of  self- 
government  laid  upon  him,  not  only  as  a  citizen, 
but  in  his  industry.  This  the  trade  unions  have 
insisted  upon  for  two  generations.  But  the  courts 
have  not  yet  sustained  on  these  grounds  any 
statute  limiting  the  hours  of  labor  of  men  or 
women. 

The  courts  hold  that,  where  obvious  physical  in- 
jury results  from  excessive  hours  of  work,  the 
freedom  of  contract  may  be  abridged.  But  courts 
and  legislators  do  not  see  that  an  industry  which 
by  long  daily  hours  of  monotonous  work  dulls  the 
mind  of  the  voters,  attacks  the  life  of  the  Repub- 
lic. It  has,  so  far  as  I  know,  never  been  held  that 
working  hours  can  be  shortened  by  statute  in  the 
interest  of  the  public  intelligence. 

Had  the  educated  men  of  my  generation  been 


Modern  Industry  and  Education     105 

trained  in  youth  to  insight  and  vision,  to  discern 
the  industrial  process  of  stupefying  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  demand  of  expanding  democracy 
for  intelligence  in  all  the  citizens,  how  different 
must  have  been  their  recent  attitude  toward  the 
movement  for  a  shorter  working  day,  for  one 
day's  rest  in  seven,  for  the  abolition  of  night  work 
in  every  possible  case! 

Democracy  makes  ever-widening  demands  upon 
the  time  and  intelligence  of  the  citizens.  The  in- 
itiative and  referendum,  the  recall,  proportional 
voting,  direct  primaries — the  new  processes  of 
democracy — call  into  action  growing  bodies  of 
public-spirited  citizens,  and  demand  of  the  rank 
and  file  a  continuing  series  of  decisions  on  matters 
of  importance.  Workmen's  compensation,  mini- 
mum wage  boards,  mothers'  pensions,  the  short 
working  day,  child  labor,  compulsory  education, 
equal  suffrage,  are  all  being  legislated  upon.  Sev- 
eral of  these  measures  call  for  popular  votes,  and 
all  of  them  concern  wage-earning  people.  There 
is  incessant  call  for  more  intelligence  in  the  voting 
constituency.  But  what  intelligence  can  a  man 
or  woman  exercise  whose  mind  is  dimmed  by 
spending  ten  hours  or  more  every  day  watching 
for  dents  in  cans?  How  can  weary  eyes  and  a 
jaded  mind  be  used  for  thoughtful  reading  on  po- 
litical subjects?  What  is  left  wherewith  to  make 


106     Modern  Industry  and  Education 

decisions?    It  is  an  irreconcilable  conflict  of  ex- 
perience. 

The  Wage  Earners  Educating  Themselves 

Men  and  women  employed  in  monotonous  in- 
dustries in  this  country  have  missed  the  stimulus 
and  education  derived  by  cooperators  from  their 
personal  interest  in  their  cooperative  business, 
because  they  have  shirked  the  task  of  cooperative 
production  and  distribution  carried  forward  on  a 
vast  scale  during  the  past  half  century  in  Eng- 
land and  on  the  Continent.  In  England  one  in 
six  of  the  adult  population  is  a  cooperator,  and 
wage-earning  consumers  sharing  in  the  control  of 
production  and  distribution  acquire  admirable  so- 
cial education  in  the  process.  All  this  has  been 
lost  out  of  the  experience  of  American  wage  earn- 
ers. Cooperative  industry  calls  for  sustained  in- 
telligent effort  by  all  the  cooperators.  Public 
ownership  calls  for  an  intelligently  critical  voting 
constituency  forever  alert  to  public  affairs.  But 
how  can  these  qualities  be  demanded  of  common 
laborers,  of  machine  tenders,  of  men  and  women 
speeded  as  American  industry  drives  them  to- 
day? 

Chief  among  the  agencies  of  education,  for  good 
or  evil,  is  work.  The  twin  sources  of  human  char- 
acter which  have  fitted  the  race  for  civilization 


Modern  Industry  and  Education     107 

are  the  daily  work  done  since  the  race  began,  and 
the  discipline  derived  from  family  life  since  the 
first  human  mother  cradled  her  first  child.  The 
schools  awaken  intelligence  in  multitudes  of  chil- 
dren during  the  few  years  of  childhood,  but  the 
character  and  the  intellectual  development  of  the 
nations  are  determined  by  the  long,  unending  dis- 
cipline of  work. 

Our  gravest  mistake  is  habitually  considering 
education  as  an  experience  of  youth;  worse  still, 
as  a  process  of  preparing  children  for  industry. 
While  consciousness  remains,  life  itself  is  educat- 
ing us. 

An  illuminating  little  book,  a  creative  study  of 
one  of  our  lost  opportunities  for  making  industry 
the  handmaiden  of  education  is  unhappily  con- 
cealed and  disguised  by  its  author,  Gerald  Stan- 
ley Lee,  under  the  silly  title,  "Inspired  Million- 
aires." It  has  substantial  merit;  it  presents 
vividly  the  stimulating  effect  upon  mill  hands 
which  would  follow  if  they  moved  step  by  step, 
in  regular  promotion,  from  one  part  of  the  work 
of  the  mill  to  another  so  that  in  an  industrial  life- 
time all  the  employes  might  come  into  contact 
with  every  process  for  which  they  are  not  physi- 
cally or  mentally  incapacitated. 

Whenever  the  workers  with  hand  and  brain 
grasp  the  possibilities  that  lurk  in  this  idea,  they 


108     Modern  Industry  and  Education 

will  undoubtedly  make  it  the  complement  to  the 
present  sordid  "efficiency"  movement.  Their  goal 
will  be  the  efficiency  of  the  manual  worker  as  a 
human  being,  not  merely  his  efficiency  in  pro- 
ducing goods  as  means  to  profits.  Then  no  man 
will  be  reduced,  like  the  slave  of  tin  cans,  to  the 
use  of  his  eyes  alone.  In  that  man's  work  there 
was  never  the  waste  of  a  motion :  there  was  only 
the  waste  of  a  human  life. 

In  a  near-by  university  city,  which  is  also  a 
manufacturing  centre,  I. spoke  recently  to  an  audi- 
ence of  about  four  hundred  wage-earning  men 
and  women.  We  were  in  a  loathsome  little  hall, 
used  during  the  week  for  moving  picture  shows, 
for  the  cruel  waste  of  the  school  buildings,  unused 
at  night,  entails  the  cost  of  rent  upon  wage  earn- 
ers who  would  gladly  use  schools  as  they  now  use 
the  ugly,  ill-ventilated  premises  which  alone  their 
wages  can  command.  The  air  was  poisonously 
bad,  but  the  audience  remained  from  eight  to 
eleven  on  Sunday  evening,  discussing  the  prosaic 
subject  of  minimum  wages  boards.  Their  eager, 
sustained  attention  was  wonderful  and,  at  the  end 
of  my  hour-long  monologue,  they  asked  questions. 
I  know  much  more  about  minimum  wages  boards 
from  defending  them  under  that  hail  of  penetrat- 
ing questions.  They  had  looked  eagerly  forward 
through  the  week  to  Sunday,  preparing  those 


Modern  Industry  and  Education     109 

questions.  Despite  the  bad  air,  they  had  suc- 
ceeded in  listening  critically.  For  them  any  possi- 
ble change  in  industrial  conditions,  however  minor 
they  may  think  that  change  likely  to  prove  under 
the  test  of  experience,  kindles  the  mind.  They 
are  people  under  stress. 

This  is  one  of  the  most  vital  processes  of  edu- 
cation going  forward  to-day — this  deliberate,  con- 
tinuing effort  of  men  and  women,  many  of  them 
already  disciplined  by  experience  in  labor  unions, 
to  brace  themselves  against  the  destructive  pres- 
sure of  industry;  to  regain  for  themselves  and 
their  fellow  wage  earners  some  share  of  possession  < 
and  control  of  industry,  through  cooperation, 
through  public  ownership,  through  every  possible 
extension  of  democracy. 

Thousands  of  such  groups  of  working  men  and 
women  are,  throughout  their  long  hours  of 
monotony  in  the  week,  saving  their  minds  from 
utter  ruin  by  pondering  the  themes  which  they 
discuss  in  their  meetings  on  Sunday.  Scattered 
everywhere  throughout  the  nation,  they  are  safe- 
guarding their  health  and  intelligence,  and  devel- 
oping their  morals  and  citizenship.  In  spite  of 
their  stupefying  work,  and  with  cruelly  little  help 
from  the  constituted  educational  authorities,  the 
wage  earners  are  educating  themselves. 


IV 


MODERN  INDUSTRY  IN  RELATION  TO 
MORALITY 


MODERN    INDUSTRY    AND    MORALITY 

We  are  undergoing  a  transition  in  the  life  of  the 
nation  greater  than  any  hitherto  experienced,  a 
change  immeasurably  greater  than  the  freeing  of 
four  million  slaves,  a  half  century  ago,  as  an  inci- 
dent of  a  long  and  terrible  war.  This  transition 
is  of  such  import  that  it  is  quite  impossible  for  us 
in  the  midst  of  it  to  measure  its  scope.  Whether 
or  not  we  are  aware  of  it,  whether  we  like  it  or  not, 
we  are  living  in  the  initial  stages  of  the  change 
from  work  done  almost  universally  for  private 
gain  to  work  in  the  service  of  all. 

The  vast  multitude  of  federal  employes  who 
conduct  the  postal  service,  the  health  service,  the 
forestry  service,  are  soon  to  be  augmented  by  rail- 
way and  telegraph  workers  administering  public 
transportation  and  communication.  Postmaster- 
General  Hitchcock,  after  introducing  parcels  posts 
and  postal  banks,  left,  as  his  parting  message  to 
the  American  people,  advice  that  the  public  should 
own  the  telegraphs  and  telephones,  and  several 
cities  in  North  Dakota  are  already  taking  his  ad- 

113 


114      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

vice.*  Postal  savings  banks  and  the  parcels  post 
came  to  us  long  after  Europe  had  tested  them, 
and  only  when  our  need  was  so  urgent  that  they 
could  not  longer  be  deferred,  and  then  only  when 
the  national  banks  were  assured  the  privilege  of 
receiving  the  postal  bank  deposits  at  two  per  cent. 
They  are  now  a  matter  of  course. 

Vast  reclamation  schemes  applying  to  swamp 
and  desert  lands,  and  river  regulation  on  a  scale 
previously  undreamed  of,  are  already  carried  out, 
or  are  now  in  process,  or  are  definitely  planned  by 
the  federal  authorities;  and  Congress  is  never 
without  measures  under  consideration  looking  in 
these  directions. 

Mr.  Stimson,  Secretary  of  War  under  Mr.  Taft, 
made  vigorous  recommendations  for  federal  activi- 
ties in  relation  to  water  storage  and  the  use  of 
power  generated  from  navigable  rivers,  and  the 
floods  have  given  new  weight  to  his  words.  The 
Secretary  of  the  Navy  has  made  public  facts 
which  strongly  support  the  bill  pending  in  Con- 
gress for  establishing  public  armor  plate  works  for 
the  use  of  the  Navy. 

The  physical  valuation  of  the  railways  by  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission,  a  long  and  ex- 
ceedingly difficult  step  toward  public  ownership, 

*  Postmaster-General  Burleson  is  bringing  the  proposal  ac- 
tively forward  in  the  Wilson  administration. 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      115 

is  already  under  way.  And  an  appropriation  for 
building  a  federal  railroad  in  Alaska  is  in  force. 
Ever- widening  areas  of  industry  are  coming  into 
public  possession,  to  be  administered  by  cities, 
states  and  by  the  federal  government:  education, 
elementary  and  advanced,  the  public  library  busi- 
ness, lighting,  the  provision  of  milk,  water,  ice  and 
coal,  the  use  of  water  power  for  generating  elec- 
tricity, as  in  the  great  hydro-electric  works  at 
Lewiston,  Maine,  and  Houston,  Texas.* 

*  Among  items  too  numerous  to  catalogue  the  following  are 
current: — 

Seattle  owns  a  street  car  line,  and  San  Francisco  both  owns 
and  operates  one;  Detroit  and  Cleveland  have  voted  to 
acquire  car  lines.  Boston  and  New  York  City  own  sub- 
ways, though  the  citizens  of  New  York  have  cause  for  bitter 
regret  that  theirs  is  leased  to  private  corporations. 

Three  Southern  cities — two  in  Texas  and  one  in  Tennessee 
— own  municipal  abattoirs,  and  the  federal  Department  of 
Agriculture  vigorously  recommends  that  all  cities  establish 
them.  City  health  inspectors  are  as  much  a  matter  of 
course  as  the  police,  and  are  now  reinforced  by  school  nurses 
and  doctors,  while  municipal  physicians  and  nurses  in  the 
tuberculosis  service,  the  maternity  service,  and  the  hospital 
follow-up  work  are  increasing  even  more  rapidly  than  are 
city  milk  stations.  Serums  and  vaccines  are  commonly  fur- 
nished by  public  health  authorities. 

It  has  recently  been  held  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  Georgia 
that  the  city  of  Camilla  may  make  and  sell  ice,  and  New 
York  City  is  now  establishing  a  municipal  ice  plant.  Schenec- 
tady  buys  and  sells  ice  and  coal  in  the  service  of  its  citizens. 
Philadelphia  has  been  sustained  by  the  Pennsylvania  courts 


116      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

The  transition  from  competition  to  public  serv- 
ice is  far  advanced.  The  very  recent  change  in 
attitude  of  legislatures  and  courts  is  more  signifi- 
cant than  the  actual  tasks  already  undertaken. 

The  material  conditions  for  the  vast  change  are 
at  hand,  and  many  phases  of  the  transition  have 
already  been  successfully  achieved  in  other  coun- 
tries whose  experience  awaits  our  study. 

The  coming  public  service  will  test  our  morality 
on  the  largest  scale  yet  applied  to  it.  Can  our 
democracy  administer  industry?  Have  we,  as  a 
nation,  the  moral  qualities  requisite  for  enduring 
that  moral  strain? 

We  who  are  here,  living  in  the  midst  of  the 
transition,  make  our  contribution  to  it  consciously 
or  unconsciously.  We  shape  it,  determine  its 
character,  and  we  are  ill-fitted  for  the  task.  We 
suffer  the  disadvantage  of  living  in  a  period  when 
the  morality  of  our  great-grandparents  is  out- 
grown, and  that  of  our  grandchildren  is  not  yet 
established.  We  live  in  a  period  of  disintegration, 
of  unparallelled  moral  pressure,  and  inadequate 
moral  guidance,  with  the  duty  resting  upon  us  of 

in  its  policy  of  buying  land  in  excess  of  its  immediate  needs 
in  connection  with  a  boulevard. 

The  state  of  Wisconsin  leases  land  in  its  lake  region  to 
summer  tenants.  It  also  sells  insurance;  and  savings  bank 
insurance  in  Massachusetts  is  increasingly  a  state  affair. 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      117 

scanning  the  horizon  for  every  ray  which  may 
serve  to  illumine  and  guide  us. 

The  fundamental  moral  teaching  that  prevailed 
on  this  continent  when  the  Republic  was  founded 
had  its  roots  in  the  experience  of  an  agricultural 
people — its  precepts  and  maxims  were  in  harmony 
with  and  adequate  to  the  clear  demands  of  re- 
sponsibility and  decency  within  the  rural  family. 
Those  precepts  defined  the  duties  of  father, 
mother  and  children  living  upon  the  farm  which 
they  owned  and  controlled,  from  which  they  de- 
rived their  subsistence — a  self-sustaining  group — 
and  the  simple  relations  of  such  a  family  group 
with  other  similar  family  groups.  Complex  mod- 
ern industrial  relations  did  not  develop  until  the 
middle  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  Then  came, 
after  the  Civil  War,  the  change  crescendo  to  the 
full  complexity  in  which  we  live. 

To-day  agriculture  is  still  our  chief  industry, 
despite  the  modern  development  which  has  made 
us  the  most  industrially  productive  of  all  nations; 
and  the  morality  of  agricultural  individualism  is 
our  accepted  morality.  This  affords  no  adequate 
guidance  in  the  intricate  relations  of  our  rapidly 
changing  life;  and  its  insufficiency  becomes  from 
year  to  year  more  obvious  with  the  evolution  of 
industry.  Between  that  obsolete  morality  which 
remains  embodied  in  our  laws,  and  our  human 


118      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

needs  in  modern  daily  life,  the  contradiction  has 
become  intolerable. 

It  is  ominous  that  the  industrial  change  comes 
not  because  the  American  people  are  intellectually 
convinced  that  it  is  desirable,  but  because  past 
conditions  can  no  longer  be  endured.  It  is,  for 
instance,  not  reassuring  that  we  are  being  driven 
toward  public  ownership  of  railroads  by  the  in- 
competence and  dishonesty  of  private  manage- 
ment, and  the  consequent  sacrifice  of  life,  limb, 
health  and  welfare  of  employes  and  of  travellers. 

This  is,  however,  the  case  at  the  present  mo- 
ment. Over-capitalization,  insufficient  equip- 
ment, overworked  employes,  appalling  railway 
accidents,  belated  travel,  delayed  freight — these 
accompaniments  of  irresponsible  anonymous 
ownership  are  driving  conservative  New  England 
toward  responsible  public  ownership  of  her  rail- 
roads. Meanwhile  the  Panama  railroad  offers  an 
enticing  sample  on  a  small  scale  of  the  ability  of 
the  federal  government  to  administer  transporta- 
tion, even  under  present  difficulties. 

Irresponsible  Anonymous  Ownership 

The  old  theory  was  that  enlightened  self-in- 
terest could  be  trusted  to  conduct  industry,  that 
the  sum  of  all  selfish  interests  would  coincide  with 
public  interest.  Tested  in  practice,  however,  this 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      119 

theory  has  not  sustained  modern  life.  Industry 
conducted  for  profit  and  regulated  only  by  the 
pressure  of  competition  (the  labor  being  per- 
formed by  men,  women  and  children  who  are 
merely  "hands")  has  produced,  among  its  fruits, 
the  maximum  cynical  disregard  of  the  manhood, 
womanhood  and  childhood  of  the  workers,  and  a 
loss  of  moral  responsibility  in  the  relation  of  the 
owners  of  industry  to  the  consuming  public. 

The  fundamental  immorality  of  our  era  from 
which  innumerable  smaller  ills  arise  is  that  the 
worker  has  lost  the  ownership  and  control  of  his 
tools,  his  means  of  production.  In  the  evolution 
from  the  distaff  and  spinning  wheel  to  the  cotton 
mill  village  owned  anonymously  by  bond  and 
stockholders  who  may  live  in  Europe,  or  in  South 
America,  or  Japan,  the  old  foundation  of  indus- 
trial morality,  honesty  between  two  individual 
persons,  is  no  longer  adequate. 

The  modern  wage  worker  deprived  of  owner- 
ship and  control  of  his  tools  is  not  obviously  de- 
pendent like  the  chattel  slave  before  the  emanci- 
pation, or  the  coolie  before  the  exclusion  laws,  or 
the  peon,  whom  the  federal  government  still  occa- 
sionally discovers  in  the  South,  where  at  this  mo- 
ment peonage  exists,  in  horrifying  forms,  in  the 
mining  regions  in  West  Virginia.  The  great  mass 
of  wage-earning  people  are  not  now  consciously 


120      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

dependent  as  the  Negroes  and  Chinese  were.  They 
are  not  like  them  conspicuously  in  need  of  being 
freed  by  the  federal  authorities. 

The  fundamental  immorality  to-day  is  far  more 
subtle.  Instead  of  the  wage  earners  owning  and 
thereby  controlling  things,  as  the  farmers  did  in 
the  agricultural  period,  they  are  now  under  the 
control  of  things  (products  and  means  of  produc- 
tion). Through  those  things  they  are  controlled 
by  other  human  beings  who,  as  stockholders  and 
bond  owners,  possess  perhaps  a  great  factory  town 
like  Gary,  Indiana,  or  a  cotton  mill  village  in 
Rhode  Island  or  Georgia — a  modern  Franken- 
stein into  which  the  ancient  tools  of  the  workers 
have  now  developed. 

As  an  example  of  such  anonymous,  impersonal 
ownership,  I  venture  once  more  to  refer  to  the 
former  conditions  in  the  steel  industry,  to  the 
cruelty,  among  others,  of  excessive  working  hours 
in  intolerable  heat.  When  in  the  Pittsburgh  Sur- 
vey the  exact  facts  were  made  public,  Mr.  Charles 
Cabot,  a  stockholder  in  the  steel  industry,  pro- 
tested that  these  things  were  not  and,  in  the  na- 
ture of  things,  could  not  be  true.  When,  however, 
the  statements  had  all  been  substantiated,  Mr. 
Cabot  declared  that  every  shareholder  in  that  in- 
dustry ought  to  know  these  conditions.  He, 
therefore,  asked  the  corporation  for  a  list  of  stock- 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      121 

holders  in  order  that  he  might  bring  the  facts  to 
the  knowledge  of  the  owners,  his  fellow  bond  and 
stockholders  in  the  industry.  Three  years  passed 
before  he  succeeded  in  getting  the  list. 

In  a  great  corporation  owned  by  bond  and 
stockholders  nobody  knows  who  is  the  employer. 
The  employer  is  a  vast  composite  changing  from 
day  to  day  with  every  transfer  of  stocks  and 
bonds.  Nor  are  the  employes  known.  Even  the 
manager  or  foreman  often  knows  a  given  employe 
only  as  a  number  on  the  pay  roll.  If  the  "hand" 
is  killed,  buried,  perhaps,  in  molten  metal,  no- 
body knows  who  has  perished  except  from  the 
number  on  his  locker.  So  entirely  anonymous  is 
the  relation  between  stockholder  and  employe, 
and  among  fellow  owners  in  the  most  highly  de- 
veloped of  our  industries.  This  form,  this  organi- 
zation of  industry,  and  this  anonymous  relation 
within  it,  have  grown  up  since  the  Civil  War. 
The  steel  industry  is,  perhaps,  the  perfect  example 
of  the  alienation  of  the  anonymous  worker  and 
anonymous  employer.  It  is  the  current  industrial 
ideal  of  organization  toward  which  the  great  in- 
dustries tend — the  uttermost  detachment  of  the 
worker  from  ownership  of  the  tools,  and  utter 
freedom  on  the  part  of  the  owners  from  personal 
responsibility  alike  toward  the  workers  and  the 
community. 


122      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

One  incidental  result  of  this  detachment  is  a 
lack  of  scruple  on  the  part  of  the  anonymous 
owners  of  a  given  industry,  the  employers  of  the 
labor  engaged  in  it,  toward  the  consuming  pub- 
lic. One  of  the  earliest  maxims  laid  down  for 
the  guidance  of  people  entering  trade  is  the  old 
Roman  saying:  Caveat  emptor — Let  the  pur- 
chaser beware!  Never  was  it  more  applicable 
than  to-day.  The  anonymous  relation  of  the  per- 
son offering  goods  for  sale  is  fundamentally  im- 
moral primarily  because  it  is  devoid  of  responsi- 
bility. 

The  federal  pure  food  act  proclaims  to  the  world 
that  our  food-producing  industries,  although  they 
are  organized  with  greater  ability  than  has  ever 
before  been  devoted  to  the  task,  cannot  be  trusted 
to  feed  America.  The  meat  inspection  law  pub- 
lishes similar  tidings  of  the  meat  industry  to  the 
people  who  consume  its  product. 

When  federal  inspection  of  the  stock  yards  was 
forced  upon  us  by  the  German  government,  which 
excluded  from  German  territory  our  meat  prod- 
ucts unless  the  commercial  integrity  of  the  pack- 
ers and  the  purity  of  their  goods  were  guaranteed 
by  the  federal  government,  the  brand  upon  the 
meat  incidentally  branded  the  packers.  The 
morality  of  the  men  in  charge  of  this  great  staple 
American  industry  has  never  borne  any  proportion 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      123 

to  their  ability.  Yet  the  federal  Department  of 
Agriculture  for  years  permitted  the  sale  to  us  of 
meat  which  could  not  be  guaranteed  by  it  and, 
therefore,  could  not  be  sent  abroad.  These  things 
have  been  possible  because  the  ownership  of  the 
vast  and  complicated  meat  industry  had  been  ir- 
responsible. There  is  no  moral  restraint  on  the 
part  of  managers  of  stock  yards.  Theirs  is  a 
property,  an  investment,  not  a  service. 

A  similar  thing  was  true  long  ago  of  the  Scotch 
fisheries.  The  contents  of  the  kegs  of  herring 
were  notoriously  different  from  their  labels,  so 
that  foreign  consumers  demanded  as  a  guarantee 
of  honest  contents  the  brand  of  the  English  gov- 
ernment. Most  products  are,  however,  not  sold 
to  foreign  nations  able  to  establish  and  to  enforce 
upon  us  an  international  standard  of  integrity. 
The  slow  passage  of  the  pure-food  law  by  Con- 
gress (requiring  eighteen  years  of  continuous  ef- 
fort) and  the  painful,  largely  unsuccessful  strug- 
gle to  get  the  law  enforced  against  powerful  food- 
producing  companies  and  their  agents  in  the  press, 
indicate  the  patience  of  the  American  people  in 
the  presence  of  commercial  dishonesty  and  lack  of 
standards. 

The  public  accepts  with  heartfelt  admiration 
gifts  to  charity  and  to  the  higher  education  from 
known  adulterators  of  food,  so  confused  are  our 


124      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

moral  standards  in  relation  to  industry.  And  this 
confusion  is  a  normal  product  of  modern  indus- 
try. 

One  sinister  consequence  of  the  anonymous,  im- 
personal ownership  of  business,  and  the  accom- 
panying degradation  of  the  workers  to  the  posi- 
tion of  "hands,"  is  their  own  acceptance  of  this 
position.  Filthy  or  diseased  meat,  adulterated 
eatables,  short-weight  packages,  though  the  prod- 
uct of  their  labor  appear  to  them  to  be  no  con- 
cern of  theirs.  They  feel  no  share  in  the  guilt  of 
the  employing  concern  under  whose  orders,  and  in 
whose  pay,  they  put  alum  in  bread,  formaldehyde 
in  milk,  tin,  lead  or  iron  in  silk  (in  the  process  of 
dyeing),  or  shoddy  in  place  of  wool  in  garments 
to  be  worn  by  other  working  people.  Steel  work- 
ers know  when  there  are  blow  holes  in  armor 
plates,  but  they  regard  it  as  no  affair  of  theirs. 
The  negotiation  is  between  the  steel  manufacturer 
and  the  Navy  Department,  and  the  wage  earner's 
experience  has  awakened  in  him  no  patriot's  rage 
against  such  treason.  If  he  thinks  at  all  of  the 
matter,  it  is  perhaps  to  reflect  that  wars  are  fought 
to  the  profit  of  financiers,  and  at  cost  of  working 
people,  whichever  side  wins.  Or  the  steel  worker 
may  sullenly  remember  that  he  has  long  been 
begging  the  Government  to  abolish  contract  work 
and  make  its  own  steel  plate. 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      125 

In  any  case,  the  irresponsible  state  of  mind  of 
employing  corporations  and  indifferent  "hands" 
is  more  threatening  to  civilization  than  the  actual 
harm  inflicted  by  alum,  formaldehyde,  shoddy, 
blow  holes  and  all  the  other  poisons  and  dishonest 
products.  And  this  indifference,  like  the  moral 
confusion  of  the  general  public  concerning  gifts 
derived  from  these  and  similar  sinister  sources  for 
the  higher  education,  philanthropy  and  religion, 
is  a  normal  product  of  modern  industry. 

Our  confusion  is  well  illustrated  in  relation  to 
our  concept  of  murder. 

The  Old  Commandment  in  the  New  Order 

The  Commandment,  Thou  Shalt  Not  Kill,  is 
still  valid  in  our  laws  to  the  extent  that  the  indi- 
vidual murderer  of  an  individual  person  pays  with 
his  life  for  his  crime,  the  hangman  or  electrocu- 
tioner  being  held — somewhat  whimsically — ex- 
empt from  the  effect  of  the  Commandment.  But 
wholesale  killing  in  industry  as  in  war  remains  un- 
punished. 

Our  morality  has  been  sapped  by  precept  and 
practice,  by  living  in  a  society  in  which  the  moral 
foundations  of  industry  are  false  and  corrupting. 
The  human  mind  accepts  without  revolt  that  to 
which  it  is  accustomed  from  childhood.  Canni- 
bals were  not  horrified  at  eating  their  grand- 


126      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

parents.  Soldiers  do  not  recoil  from  murder,  they 
plan  it  systematically  years  in  advance;  and  on 
the  field  of  battle  they  bayonet  men  as  butchers 
stick  pigs.  And  gentle  grandmothers  give  little 
children  paper  or  tin  soldiers  as  playthings,  and 
read  of  bayonet  charges  with  enthusiasm. 

Owners  of  tenement  houses  do  not  count  them- 
selves infanticides,  though  the  death  rate  of  babies 
in  tenements  is  twice  as  large  as  elsewhere.  On 
the  contrary,  the  real  estate  interests  fight  as  one 
man  every  requirement  of  tenement  house  sanita- 
tion which  seems  to  threaten  to  cut  into  their 
incomes.  The  landlords'  resistance  to  improved 
housing  is  uninterrupted  and  nation  wide. 

Although  dirty  milk  is  a  permanently  active 
cause  of  disease  and  death,  the  milk  producers  and 
dealers  succeeded  in  1913  in  defeating  legislation 
calculated  to  assure  greater  cleanliness  in  the  rural 
treatment  of  the  milk  supply  of  New  York  City. 

Builders,  managers,  stock  and  bond  holders  of 
factories  are  not  punished  as  murderers,  though  a 
hundred  and  more  men  and  women  perish  by  fire 
and  smoke  in  a  single  work  room.  In  connection 
with  the  most  terrible  of  factory  fires,  the  owners 
of  the  building  have  been  absolved  by  the  courts 
of  New  York  State  from  all  criminal  responsibil- 
ity for  the  monstrous  slaughter,  and  the  firm  is 
still  doing  business. 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      127 

When  hundreds  of  women  and  children  on  a 
Sunday  School  outing  in  the  East  River  perished 
by  drowning,  many  of  the  'victims  were  lost  be- 
cause the  cork  safety  belts  carried  on  the  boat  were 
weighted  with  lead  or  iron,  substances  cheaper 
than  cork  in  belts  bought  and  sold  by  weight. 
Only  the  captain  of  the  Slocum  was  punished. 
Manufacturers  and  dealers  in  cork  safety  belts  ap- 
pear to  be  free  to  continue  to  furnish  their  death- 
dealing  wares. 

We  are  by  way  of  forgetting  the  Iroquois  Thea- 
tre in  Chicago  in  which  children  were  suffocated 
at  a  matinee.  The  manager — far  from  having 
been  punished  for  failing  to  supply  the  needed 
precautions  for  safety — appeared  before  a  legis- 
lative committee  at  Springfield,  in  1911,  insolently 
to  oppose,  and  demand  the  repeal  of,  the  benefi- 
cent Illinois  statute  which  keeps  young  children 
off  the  stage. 

Some  years  ago  a  speculator  cornered  the  ice 
supply  in  summer  in  New  York  City.  The  price 
rose,  poor  mothers  could  not  buy  ice,  and  the  list 
of  deaths  of  babies  lengthened,  for  milk  without 
ice  is  poison  in  the  tenements  in  summer.  Later 
for  an  offence  unrelated  to  this,  the  speculator  was 
sent  to  a  federal  penitentiary  for  a  long  term. 
Upon  the  representations  of  reputable  physicians 
that  the  convict  was  about  to  die,  the  President 


128      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

pardoned  him.  Our  moral  sense  is  dulled  by 
modern  industry,  and  the  President  in  pardon- 
ing a  single  influential  one  among  hundreds 
of  sick  convicts,  and  one  whose  record  was, 
perhaps,  the  most  anti-social  of  all,  did  but  act  in 
accordance  with  prevailing  standards. 

It  is  silly  and  confusing  to  tilt  at  Big  Business, 
as  though  bigness  in  itself  were  the  sole  or  the 
chief  active  element  in  our  political  and  industrial 
immorality.  The  pushcart  peddlers  and  news  ven- 
dors who  have  stands  on  city  street  corners  are 
animated  by  precisely  the  same  business  motives 
as  the  gas  trust,  the  surface  car  companies  and  all 
the  other  large  exploiters  of  the  cities.  And  their 
very  numbers  make  the  little  offenders  perhaps 
the  more  insidiously  poisonous  to  the  community, 
in  these  days  of  transition  to  new  forms  of  indus- 
try calling  for  new  and  loftier  morality.  The 
source  of  corruption  in  large  and  small  alike  is  ir- 
responsibility, the  relation  to  the  community  of 
freebooting  exploiters  in  a  society  which  sends 
those  who  fail  to  the  almshouse  and  the  potter's 
field. 

Morally  Extra  Hazardous  Employments 

In  any  review  of  the  moral  aspects  of  our  pres- 
ent transition,  our  failure  to  develop  voluntary 
cooperation  in  distribution  looms  large.  We  are 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      129 

punished  for  our  sins  of  omission  by  having  the 
vastest  department  store  industry  in  the  world 
with  its  morally  extra  hazardous  employment  of 
thousands  of  underpaid,  inexperienced  young 
women  and  girls,  transferred  from  the  meagre  life 
of  the  tenement  and  the  narrow,  rigid  routine  of 
the  elementary  school  to  the  midst  of  luxury  such 
as  had  not  been  invented  in  the  days  of  Louis 
XVI.  In  the  midst  of  this  poisonous  luxury  they 
are  paid  from  three  dollars  a  week  upward. 

In  the  interest  of  the  public  morals — because  of 
the  nature  of  the  surroundings  and  the  unlimited 
access  of  the  public — the  demand  would  be  a  le- 
gitimate one  that  girls  should  not  be  employed 
in  department  stores  before  the  21st  birthday,  un- 
til their  youthful  character  had  time  to  solidify. 

The  investment  in  department  stores  is  stu- 
pendous. In  the  whole  country  it  runs  into  hun- 
dreds of  millions,  upon  which  dividends  must  be 
earned.  Window  dressing,  counter  dressing,  and 
newspaper  advertising  are  obviously  directed  to 
the  single  purpose  of  enticing  consumers,  chiefly 
women,  to  buy,  in  addition  to  the  necessary 
staples,  articles  of  which  they  would  otherwise 
not  think.  Its  aim  is  the  enticement  of  consum- 
ers, as  adulterating  goods  in  manufacture  is  in- 
tended to  exploit  them. 

This  particular  form  of  moral  strain  was  un- 


130      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

known  before  the  present  half  century.  The  dis- 
proportion between  what  the  employes  get  and 
what  surrounds  them,  indicates  the  cynicism,  the 
blunted  sympathy  of  the  consuming  public.  Were 
women  richer  in  discernment,  in  sympathetic  im- 
agination, we  must  have  registered  long  since  our 
veto  upon  this  /mseducation  of  ourselves  and  of 
those  who  serve  us  in  the  stores.  As  an  index  both 
of  our  undeveloped  sympathy  and  of  our  potential 
power  as  consumers,  these  stores  are  monumental. 
We  have  never  even  discerned  how  pernicious  is 
their  influence  in  the  great  cities. 

Had  we  developed  a  cooperative  movement  in 
proportion  to  our  retail  distribution,  comparable 
to  the  similar  movements  in  England,  Germany 
and  Belgium,  our  exploitation  of  young  workers 
in  retail  trade  could  never  have  reached  its  pres- 
ent extent.  In  cooperative  commerce  there  is  vir- 
tually no  advertising.  Goods  are  made,  trans- 
ported and  sold  to  meet  human  needs  which  re- 
quire no  stimulation.  The  consequent  saving  to 
the  public  is  not  confined  to  dollars  and  cents.  For 
both  employes  and  purchasers  the  saving  of 
moral  strain  is  incalculable. 

How  alien  to  our  whole  habit  of  mind  is  the  de- 
mand for  an  administration  of  industry  giving  to 
the  workers  active  benefit  throughout  the  process 
of  work  itself!  We  may,  indeed,  be  justly  charged 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      131 

with  having  maintained  a  national  policy  of  pres- 
sure upon  the  wage  earners.  For  generations  we 
imported  slaves.  When  that  form  of  competition 
was  abolished,  there  came  the  coolies.  After  their 
Irish  competitors  succeeded  in  getting  them  ex- 
cluded, peonage  and  child  labor  loomed  up,  and 
still  exist.  Now  the  steerage  brings  detached 
young  girls  by  tens  of  thousands  from  Europe. 

Every  immigrant  girl  who  enters  upon  manu- 
facture or  commerce  is  a  living  threat  to  the 
standard  of  life  of  men  and  women  already  here. 
Witness  Lawrence,  Little  Falls,  the  stockyards, 
the  underpaid  needle  trades,  the  department 
stores. 

Since  the  Children's  Crusade,  dark  episode  of 
the  Dark  Ages,  there  has  been  no  international 
spectacle  at  once  so  pathetic,  so  cruel,  so  shameful 
to  the  nations  which  permit  it,  as  this  migration 
of  young  girls  lured  by  American  industry. 

Moral  Self-education  by  Consumers 

For  nearly  a  quarter  century  the  Consumers' 
League  has  been  bringing  to  bear  upon  industry 
the  intelligence  of  consumers  in  the  interests  of 
their  own  consciences  and  of  the  life,  health,  in- 
telligence and  well-being  of  wage  workers.  It  has 
promoted  short  working  hours  for  women  and 
children,  wage  boards,  and  healthful  conditions  of 


132      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

work,  and  the  abolition  of  child  labor  and  of  the 
sweating  system.  The  League  holds  that  con- 
sumers are  entitled  to  a  clean  conscience  if  they 
act  as  conscientious  people;  that  they  can,  if  they 
will,  enforce  a  claim  to  have  all  that  they  buy  free 
from  the  taint  of  cruelty.  By  faithful  organized 
inquiry  they  can  ascertain  the  facts  of  industry, 
and  when  in  the  light  of  the  facts  standards  are 
set  up,  consumers  have  power  to  enforce  them. 
After  this  quarter  century  of  modest  experimental 
effort,  it  is  clear  that  the  enlightened  consuming 
public  is  destined  to  play  an  increasing  part  in 
determining  industrial  morality. 

Nothing  could,  however,  be  clearer  than  the 
teaching  of  this  same  quarter  century's  experi- 
ence :  that  no  one  can,  by  individual  effort  alone, 
however  patient  and  enlightened  that  effort  may 
be,  achieve  any  satisfying  personal  relation  to  in- 
dustry. The  larger  the  range  and  scope  of  the 
associated  effort,  the  greater  its  value,  particularly 
its  educational  value,  for  the  participants.  Think- 
ing people  are  challenged  to  ceaseless  effort  to  in- 
crease the  enlightened  power  of  consumers  over 
production  and  distribution,  by  law,  by  publicity, 
by  cooperation. 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      133 

Our  Preparation  for  the  Change 

Our  lack  is  intellectual  and  spiritual.  We  dis- 
trust ourselves  and  each  other.  The  mental  en- 
ergy of  our  ablest  men  has  been  too  largely  ex- 
pended in  industrial  organization  in  the  service  of 
greed  for  dividends.  We  have  been  taught  too 
long,  and  we  have  believed  too  credulously,  that 
the  profit  motive  is  the  best  of  which  we  are  ca- 
pable. The  failure  and  crime  that  we  see  we  at- 
tribute to  the  frailty  of  human  nature,  not,  as  the 
facts  demand,  to  the  corroding  power  of  industry 
on  a  basis  fundamentally  immoral. 

We  all  suffer  a  lack  of  moral  sensitiveness  be- 
cause we  are,  throughout  our  lives,  members  of  a 
society  in  which  the  average  length  of  life  of  wage 
earners  is  conspicuously  less  than  the  life  of  pros- 
perous people.  We  accept  this  with  equanimity 
as  we  accept  child  labor,  and  avoidable  night  work 
even  when  performed  by  young  girls,  and  the 
monstrous  spectacle  of  wholesale  poverty  in  the 
midst  of  riches  beyond  the  power  of  the  mind  to 
compute  or  to  conceive.  Our  industrial  epoch  has 
corroded  our  morals  and  hardened  our  hearts  as 
surely  as  slavery  injured  its  contemporaries,  and 
far  more  subtly.  There  is  grave  reason  to  fear 
that  it  may  have  unfitted  us  for  the  oncoming 
stage  of  civilization,  as  slave  owning  unfitted  the 


134      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

white  race  for  freedom  and  democracy,  and  left  its 
blight  of  race  hatred  from  which  the  Republic  still 
suffers. 

Acid  tests  of  the  industrial  morality  of  every 
public  movement  are  the  questions :  "Does  it  tend 
to  restore  to  the  people  who  work  a  share  in  the 
ownership  and  control  of  the  tools  of  industry? 
Does  it  contribute  to  the  ability  of  any  group  of 
wage  earners  to  fit  themselves  in  mind,  character 
and  economic  position  to  participate  helpfully  in 
the  transition?  Does  it  promote  the  enactment  of 
the  industrial  code?".  Whatever  is  calculated  to 
enable  us  as  a  people,  or  any  group  among  us,  to 
make  a  step  forward  on  the  road  to  peaceful  serv- 
ice away  from  the  battlefield  of  greed,  is  a  contri- 
bution to  the  sum  total  of  industrial  morality. 
And  whatsoever  hinders  a  forward  step  is  in  itself 
actively  evil,  because  it  prolongs  the  existing  evil. 

We  can  retrieve  our  integrity  only  as  we  come 
to  accept  as  our  ideal  service  instead  of  profit. 
And  this  can  be  achieved  only  as  industry  becomes 
a  city,  state,  and  national  service.  We  are,  in- 
deed, confronted  by  the  task  of  extending  public 
ownership  of  industry,  and  cooperative  distribu- 
tion of  products,  in  the  interest  of  the  moral  life 
of  the  American  people. 

No  one  can  predict  how  we,  as  a  nation,  shall 
bear  the  strain  of  industry  made  collective,  and 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      135 

permanently  a  cooperative  undertaking  of  citi- 
zens, without  the  relation  of  master  and  men.  No 
prophet  can  foretell  with  certainty  whether  we 
can  make  that  change  peacefully,  without  a  great 
revulsion  and  reaction,  by  reason  of  the  unco- 
operative spirit  in  which  we  have  all  been  bred. 
In  the  transition  from  the  old  industrial  society 
we  need  to  bring  to  bear  all  the  wisdom,  all  the 
varied  experience  and  discipline,  that  life  has  be- 
stowed upon  us  all.  We  cannot  safely  omit  from 
the  common  task  any  human  soul  however  hum- 
ble. 

In  each  generation  some  cause  arises  which 
serves  as  a  touchstone  for  the  genuine  democracy 
of  mankind.  Such  to-day  is  the  industrial  transi- 
tion. On  the  Pacific  Coast  and  in  the  Northwest 
where  the  citizens  have  developed  democratic  in- 
stitutions— the  initiative,  the  referendum,  the  re- 
call (including  judges),  equal  suffrage,  minimum 
wage  boards,  and  the  short  working  day — they  go 
forward  confidently  with  transition  measures. 
There  the  conservation  battle  rages. 

Indeed,  the  most  hopeful  feature  of  our  outlook 
is  our  democracy,  the  fact  that  manhood  suffrage 
has  long  been  a  matter  of  course  in  most  of  the 
states,  the  rapidly  developing  movement  for  giv- 
ing votes  to  women,  and  the  spread  of  the  new  de- 


136      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

vices  of  democracy  eastward  from  the  Pacific 
Coast. 

It  is  the  teachers'  duty  to  prepare  the  minds  of 
the  next  generation  for  carrying  on  the  further 
stages  of  this  industrial  and  political  change.  But 
how  can  the  teachers  themselves  be  fitted  for  their 
task? 

The  time  of  transition  needs  more  than  all 
things  else  socially  minded  people,  multitudes  of 
average  men  and  women  trained  to  habits  of  in- 
tegrity and  cooperation.  But  what  preparation 
has  been  made  for  this? 

Aside  from  building  and  loan  associations,  and 
farmers'  clubs  and  other  agricultural  organiza- 
tions, including  the  shippers'  associations,  we  are 
almost  without  the  experience  of  industrial  co- 
operation. 

Among  industrial  wage-earning  people — outside 
the  railway  Brotherhoods — organization,  asso- 
ciated action,  has  had  to  fight  a  losing  battle  for 
its  life.  In  the  steel  industry,  in  the  stock  yards 
and  packing  houses,  and  in  numerous  other  occu- 
pations there  has  been  a  systematic  and  largely 
successful  movement  to  extinguish  the  unions, 
some  of  the  most  important  of  which  have 
perished  outright,  while  others  have  been  per- 
manently crippled. 

The  treasurer  of  a  great  manufacturing  cor- 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      137 

poration  explained  to  me  with  pride  and  pleasure 
some  years  ago,  on  the  occasion  of  his  leaving  his 
office,  that,  in  his  opinion,  his  greatest  service  had 
consisted  in  the  device  which  he  had  invented  for 
making  organization  impossible  among  the  em- 
ployes. This  device  consisted  in  a  rigid  rule  that, 
whenever  the  unskilled  men  in  any  department 
who  spoke  the  same  language  reached  the  propor- 
tion of  fifteen  per  cent,  of  all  the  men  in  that  de- 
partment, men  speaking  other  languages  must  be 
engaged.  This  was  avowedly  for  the  purpose  of 
making  it  difficult  for  the  men  to  know  each  other. 
This  method  has  since  been  widely  adopted  by 
large  employers. 

For  five  and  twenty  years  the  unions  have  been 
increasingly  compelled  to  place  themselves  on  a 
war  footing,  if  they  were  to  exist  at  all,  and  the 
enormous  majority  of  wage  earners  are  wholly 
unorganized.  No  preparation  could  be  less 
adapted  than  this  to  a  peaceful  change  to  indus- 
try organized  as  a  public  service.  Grave,  indeed, 
is  the  responsibility  of  the  men  who  have  done 
this,  gravest  of  all  when,  in  the  process,  they  have 
deprived  working  men  and  women  of  the  consti- 
tutional rights  of  organization  and  assemblage,  of 
freedom  of  speech  and  of  the  press! 

The  causal  relation  of  industry  to  the  present 
evils  in  social  life  and  personal  character  has  been 


138      Modern  Industry  and  Morality 

slow  to  compel  recognition,  slower  in  this  country 
than  in  Europe.  With  growing  insight  comes  a 
challenge  to  our  integrity  of  intellect  and  charac- 
ter. To  see  injustice  without  protesting  is  to  share 
in  it.  To  profit  by  recognized  injustice  is  cynical. 

This  causal  relation  reveals  itself  naturally  first 
to  those  who  suffer  acutely,  to  men  and  women 
who,  working  long  and  hard,  get  little  pay,  are  in- 
jured in  health,  and  die  young.  Their  work  brings 
them  together  in  mines  and  mills,  in  industrial 
cities  such  as  the  world  never  before  beheld,  their 
daily  experience  is  in  common,  they  compare 
grievances,  and  are  stimulated  to  common  effort 
for  the  common  good.  Because  they  can  achieve 
nothing  alone,  they  are  disciplined  perforce  to 
work  together,  to  acquire  whatever  virtues  come 
of  voluntary  association. 

Just  in  proportion  as  they  resist  the  inherent 
tendency  of  industry  and  participate  in  hasten- 
ing the  change  they  are  agents  of  regeneration. 
Unlike  the  slaves  who  were  set  free  without  their 
own  participation,  unlike  the  coolies  who  were 
excluded  without  protest,  the  wage  earners 
through  their  solidarity,  their  organizations,  their 
political  party,  test  the  democracy  of  our  time 
and  are  preparing,  however  haltingly,  the  condi- 
tions necessary  to  a  higher  and  finer  civilization. 

The  changed  morality  that  is  needed  to  make 


Modern  Industry  and  Morality      139 

the  present  transformation  in  our  national  life  a 
beneficent  one  is  yet  to  be  inculcated  in  the 
schools,  the  colleges  and  universities.  The  teach- 
ing profession  confronts  to-day  the  noble  task  of 
preparing  the  mind  and  spirit-  of  the  oncoming 
generation  for  this  change.  Theirs  is  the  new  duty 
of  inculcating  the  new  ideal  of  the  democracy  of 
the  future:  the  ideal  of  service  performed  not  as 
philanthropy,  not  as  charity,  not  alone  in  the  care 
of  childhood  and  old  age,  but  in  a  transformed 
industry,  a  universal  service  of  men  and  women  of 
to-morrow — the  direct,  inevitable  consequence  of 
the  industrial  development  of  to-day. 


INDEX 


Alabama- 
child  labor  in,  52,  92 
Alaska — 

federal  railroad  in,  115 

women  vote  in,  36 
American — 

colleges     and     universities, 
83 

Conference    on   Social    In- 
surance, 47 

industry,  100,  122 

monographs    on    industrial 
disease,  56 

Social  Science   Association, 

81 
Andrews,  John  B. — 

investigation  of  white  sul- 
phur in  industry,  56 
Arbitration — 

compulsory — of    labor    dis- 
putes, 4 
Arizona — 

eight-hour  law  in,  36,  74 

women  vote  in,  36 
Arkansas — 

birth  registration  in,  45 

harvesting  in,  10 
Auburn,  9,  28 
Australia,  25,  32,  33 
Berlin,  University  of,  82 


Berne- 
International       Conference 
for      Labor      Legislation 
in,  73 

Births,  registration  of,  45,  46 

Bismarck,  Prince,  83 

Boston  owns  subways,  115 

Bournemouth,  26 

Burleson,      Postmaster  -  Gen- 
eral, 114 

Butler,   Elizabeth,   24 

Cabot,  Charles,  120 

California — 
eight-hour  law  for  women 

in,  36,  74 

minimum  wage  law  in,  36 
women  vote  in,  36 

Camilla,  Georgia,  city  of,  115 

Canada,     untaxing    buildings 

in,  25 
harvesting  in  Western,  10 

Carolinas,  the — 
child  labor  in,  52,  92 
housing  in,  22 

Census,  the,  16,  44,  64,  74,  98 

Chicago — 

congested  districts  in,  47 
new  voters  in,  53 
—Stockyards,  31,  46,  57 
—University  Settlement,  31 


141 


142 


Index 


Child  labor,  5,  6,  17,  27,  28, 

52,  57,  91,  93,  105,  133 
Federal  bill,  93,  94,  102 
National  Committee,  91,  98 
Children's  Bureau,  45 
Cincinnati,    Haeberle    monu- 
ment in,  6 

free  school  books  in,  6 
Clark,  S.  A.,  55 
Code,   the    industrial,    5,   37, 

134 

Colorado — 
eight-hour  day  for  women 

in,  36,  74 

Minimum  Wage  Board,  36 
women  vote  in,  36 
Commons,  Professor,  62 
Compulsory    arbitration,    4 
Compulsory   education    5,   6, 

18,  100,  105 

Congested  districts,  23,  24 
Congestion  of  population  in 
Borough    of    Manhattan, 
24 
Connecticut,  closing  hour  for 

women's  work,  74 
farm  labor  in,  10 
Consumers,   55,   85,    89,    106, 

123,  129,  131,  132 
Consumers'  League,  131,  132 
Continuation  schools,  52. 

in  Ohio  and  Wisconsin,  95 
Cooperative     Congress     (In- 
ternational), 34 
— distribution,   134 


Cooperation,  development  of, 

37,  109 
— in   England   and   on  the 

Continent,  34,  106 
Cornell,  81,  83 
Cost  of  living,  53 
Court    of    Appeals    of    New 

York,  13,  28 

Dangerous   industries,  64,   70 
Death  rate,  16,  17,  47 
Detroit     votes     to     acquire 

street  car  line,  116 
District   of  Columbia,  eight- 
hour  day  for  women  in, 
36,  74 

Ellis  Island,  64 
Ely,  Professor  Richard  T.,  81 
England,  8,  16,  26,  130 
Federated  Cooperative  So- 
cieties in,  34 
Garden  Cities  in,  25 
Lloyd    George    land    taxes 

in,  25 

minimum  wage  laws  in,  32 
Erdman  Act,  31 
Europe,   31,  63,   64,  81,   119, 

138 

night  work  treaty  in,  73 
Extra-hazardous       industries, 

65,  66 

morally,  128 

Factory  inspection,  67,  68 
Fall  River,  16 
Fatigue,  53,  71,  72,  75 
— and   Efficiency,  71 


Index 


143 


Federal  Cabinet,  47 
— Census  Bureau,  45 
—child  labor  bill,  93,  94 
—civil  service,  31 
— Commission    on   Homes, 

26 

— Department    of    Agricul- 
ture, 115,  123 
— Department    of    Health, 

47 

— Employes,  113 
—Government,      63,      119, 

122 
— inspection  of  stockyards, 

122 

— penitentiary,  127 
—Pure  Food  Act,  50,  122 
— railroad  in  Alaska,  115 
— Report  on  Conditions  of 
Labor    of    Woman    and 
Child  Wage-earners,  16 
Foreign  colonies,  48 
Frankfort,  26 
Garden  cities,  25 
Gary,  Indiana,  120 
Georgia,  120 
Camilla,  115 

child  labor  in,  52,  92,  94 
housing  in,  21,  22 
Supreme  Court  of,  115 
Germany,  8,  16,  64,  82 
cooperative    movement   in, 

130 

factory  inspectors  in,  67 
social  insurance  in,  46,  65 


Glasgow,    International    Co- 
operative Congress  in,  35 
Goldmark,  Josephine,  71 
Haeberle,  Joe,  6 
Hamilton,    Alice,    studies    of 

lead  poisoning  by,  56 
Health,  Safety  and  Comfort 

Act   (Illinois),  56,  57 
Hedger,  Dr.  Caroline,  30 
Holden  vs.  Hardy,  70 
Homework,  5,  28 
Housing — 
— codes,  5 
—in     Carolinas,     Georgia, 

Virginia,  22 

—New  York  City,  23,  24 
— problem   hitherto  insolu- 
ble, 53 

Hull  House,  10 
Hunter,  Robert,  19 
Illinois — 
State  Factory  Inspector  of, 

57 

women  vote  in,  36 
Indiana,     closing     hour     for 

work  of  women  in,  74 
Gary,  120 

Industrial  code,  4,  28,  37,  134 
Industrial  disease,   14,  56,  63 

tuberculosis  an,  53 
Industrial  hygiene,  56,  85 
Infant  mortality,  16,  49 

crusade   against,  41 
Initiative     and     referendum, 
105,  135 


144 


Index 


Institutions  for  children,   18 
Insurance — 
International       Conference 

on  Social,  47 
mutual,  65 
— records,  45 
savings  bank,  116 
social,  4,  46,  47 
International  Conference  for 

Labor   Legislation,  73 
International         Cooperative 

Alliance,  35 

Interstate    Commerce    Com- 
mission, 114 
Ives  case,  13,  67 
Japan,  119 

Kansas,  women  vote  in,  36 
Labor  organizations,  12,  109, 

136,   137 
Land  taxes,  25 
Lee,  General  Stanley,  107 
Lloyd  George,  25 
Lloyd,  Henry  Demarest,  102, 

103 

Lochner  vs.  New  York,  70 
Lords  of  Industry,  88,  102 
Los  Angeles — 
enfranchised      women     in, 

53 
nursing  the   poor  in  their 

homes  in,  42 
Massachusetts — 
State  Board  of  Health,  56 
closing    hour    for    women's 
work  in,  74 


Massachusetts — Continued 
compulsory  education  of  il- 
literate minors  in,  95 
eight-hour  working  day  of 

children  in,  93 
savings  bank  insurance  in, 

116 

Metschnikoff,  Professor,  43 
Michigan — 

alcohol   industry  in,  75 

registration  of  births,  45 

Milk  stations,  48,  50,  51,  115 

Minimum    wage    boards,    5, 

31,  32,  105,  108,  135 
— standards   of  home   con- 
struction, 21 

— standards    in    education, 
91 


eight-hour  day  of  working 

children  in,  93 
Supreme  Court  of,  72 
Mothers'  pensions,  5,  14 
National  Consumers'  League, 

55,  57,  71,  74,  91 
—Child  Labor  Committee, 

91 

— Education  Association,  91 
Nebraska,    closing    hour    for 

women's  work  in,  74 
New  England,  16,  45,  118 
cotton  mill  regions  of,  15 
farm  labor  in,  10 
working  day  of  children  in, 
93 


Index 


145 


New  Jersey — 
birth  registration  in,  46 
silk  mills  in,  89 
New  York  City,  19,  47,  50 
birth  registration  in,  45 
congested  district  in,  23 
housing  in,  21,  23,  24,  26 
municipal  milk  stations  in, 

49,  126 
nursing  the   poor   in  their 

homes  in,  42 
Paulist  Fathers  in,  88 
— owns  subways,  115 
working  papers  in,  98 
New  York  State,  7,  8,  12 
children's     institutions     in, 

18 
Civil   Service   Commission, 

68 
closing   hour    for   women's 

work  in,  74 
Constitution,  13,  28 
Court   of   Appeals,   13,  28, 

67 
Factories   Investigating 

Commission,  56 
Factory  Inspectors,  68 
registration  of  births  in,  45 
New  Zealand,  25 
Night  work,  4,  5,  11,  12,  15, 

17,  62,  73,  74,  89,  105,  133 
North   Carolina,  birth  regis- 
tration in,  45 
Ohio- 
alcohol  industry  in,  75 


Ohio— Continued 

child  labor  in,  6 

compulsory  education  in,  6 

continuation      schools     in, 
95 

free  schoolbooks  in,  6 
Oliver,  Sir  Thomas,  15,  56 
Oregon- 
minimum  wage  law  in,  36 

women  vote  in,  36 

working  day  of  women  in, 

71 
Ownership,  cooperative,  36 

corporate,  25 

home,  28 

irresponsible       anonymous, 
114,  118 

— of  business,  124 

—of  tools,  119,  121 

primitive,  35 

public,  106,  109,  118,  133 
Pasteur  Institute,  44 
Paulist  Fathers,  88 
Pennsylvania — 

Closing  hour  for   women's 
work  in,  74 

Coal  roads  in,  29,  30 

glass  industry  in,  92 

legislature  of,  63 

registration  of  births  in,  45 

silk  mills  in,  89 

Supreme  Court  of,  64,  65, 
66,  115 

Westmoreland,  29 
Philadelphia,  69,  115 


146 


Index 


Pittsburgh,  57,  58 
City  of,  63 
Ellis  Island  to,  63 
—Survey,  57,  62,  120 

Port  Sunlight,  26 

Recall,  76,  135 

Referendum,  36,  135 

Registration — 
area,  45,  47 
— of  births,  45 
—of  deaths,  46 
— of  tuberculosis,  46 

Rhode  Island,  120 

Rochester,    milk   stations   in, 
49 

Russell      Sage      Foundation, 
71 

Safety  devices,  4 

San  Francisco — 
new  voters  in,  53 
owns  street  car  line,  115 
women  voters  recall  Judge 
Weller   in,  76 

Schenectady,  115 

Scholarship  committee,  20 

Seattle  owns  street  car  line, 
115 

Shaftesbury,  Lord,  86 

Sherman,  P.  T.,  Commission- 
er of  Labor,  69 

Slocum  disaster,  127 

Social  insurance,  46 

Standard  of — 
— education,  91 
— housing,  21 


Standard  of — 

—living,  53,  54 

—wages,  54 

Steel  industry,  62,  64,  121,  136 
Strikes  for  higher  wages,  54 

for  shorter  working  hours, 

69 

Sumner,  Professor,  81 
Supreme  Court  of — 

— Mississippi,  72 

—Pennsylvania,  64,  66,  115 

—United  States,  65,  66,  70, 
71,  74,  75 

—Washington,  65 
Sweating  system,  5,  23 
Switzerland,  82 
Taxation,  25 
Taxes,  14,  18 

Tenement  houses,  21,  24,  28, 
126 

certified  milk  in,  51 

—breeding  places  of  tuber- 
culosis, 51 

—reform,  23,  25 
Tennessee,   birth   registration 
in,  45 

municipal  abattoirs  in,  115 
Texas,  harvesting  in,  10 

municipal  abattoirs  in,  115 
Tuberculosis,  18,  51 

crusade  against,  41 

preventing,  54 

tenements   breeding   places 

of,  26,  52 
Ulm,  land  policy  of,  26 


Index 


147 


Unemployment,  5 
United  States,  47,  56,  82 

— constitution,  67 

—Supreme    Court,    65,    67, 

70,  71,  73,  74 
Utah- 
minimum  wage  law  in,  36 

women  vote  in,  36 
Vancouver,    untaxing    build- 
ings in,  25 
Vice,  75 
Virginia — 

housing  in,  22 
Vital  statistics,  45,  46 
Vocational  education,  95 
Wage   boards,   5,   31-33,   105, 

108,  135 

Wages,    public     interference 
with,  54 

public  regulation  of,  33 

strikes  for  increased,  54 

unskilled  laborers,  23 

— legislation,  55 

—scale,  31 

women's,  27 
Washington — 

eight-hour  law  for  women 
in,  36 

women  vote  in,  36 

workmen's  compensation  in, 
65,  67 


Weller,  Judge  Charles,  76 
Werner,  Justice,  13 
Westmoreland,  29 
West  Virginia  boys  work  at 
night  in,  89 

coal  roads  in,  28 

glass  works  in,  89-92 

lack   of  vital  statistics  in, 
46 

peonage  in,  119 
Widows,  13,  23 

— pensions,  5,  14,  19 
Wilson,  President,  74 

Administration,   114 
Wisconsin,    alcohol    industry 
in,  75 

continuation  schools  in,  95 

leases  land  to  summer  ten- 
ants, 115 

Woerishoffer,  Carola,  84 
Working  hours,  12,  69,  104 

—of  bakers,  70,  71 

—of  children,  93 

—miners,  70 

— steel  industry,  62,  63 

strikes  for  shorter,  69 
Working  papers,  45,  98,  100 
Workmen's   compensation,  4, 

13,  66,  67,  105 
Wyatt,  Edith,  55 
Zurich,  82 


TWENTIETH  CENTURY  SOCIALISM 

What  it  is  not;    What  it  is; 
How  it  may  come. 

BY 

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Author  of  "Government  or  Human 

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LONGMANS,  GREEN,  AND  CO.,  NEW  YORK 


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